The StyleSheet - For businesses that use the internet

Only YOU Can Prevent Frankensite

Posted February 11, 2010 By Sarah Buser |

Symptoms

• Web site has no consistency when you click from page to page.
• Photos take their sweet time to load.
• Headings are used as decorations instead of for structure.
• Site gives overall impression of jankiness.

Diagnosis

Frankensite (n.): A Web site made with a hodge-podge of graphics, fonts, and aesthetics. Risks include turned-off visitors and appearance of disorganization.

Causes

• The Web site has been around a while and no one has devoted much TLC to it lately.
• Half a dozen people with completely different aesthetic tastes have made changes.
• People who haven’t been trained properly have used the editor incorrectly.
• New types of content don’t quite fit the layout of your old site.

Prevention

Before you launch:

• Make sure anyone who will edit the site learns about writing for the Web and using your system.
• Think about basic layouts that might help your different types of content fit the best and create (or get help creating) a template.

After you launch:

• Review your content regularly to watch for the symptoms above.
• Get refresher trainings. If you only update the site twice a year, you may not remember how to do it.
• Don’t paste formatted content (like from Word or an email) into the editor.
• As you add new types of content, remember you can add templates (see above). A Web site is a living document, so you can add templates even after launch.
• Keep the overall goals of the site in mind as you add new things to it. Don’t add clutter for the sake of clutter.

Treatment of Common Symptoms

Symptom	Cause	Treatment
Fonts look tiny or don’t match.	The text was probably pasted from Word or an email.	Go into the editor, cut the afflicted text, and paste it in using the Paste as Plain Text option. If you aren’t using an editor, you can paste the text into a Notepad or TextEdit to strip out the bad code.
Pictures load very slowly (usually top to bottom).	The picture hasn’t been sized properly, meaning a huge image was “dragged” to display at a smaller size. It displays small, but the file is huge so it takes a long time to load.	Test this by looking at the site, right-click the image and click “View in a New Window”. If the new window reveals a larger image than you see on the page, you know the image was sized incorrectly. Edit the actual image to the size you want it to show up and reinsert it.
Pages are disorganized or hard to follow and/or too much of the text appears big, bold or colorful.	Headings are being used for style instead of structure.	Use headings to structure and bold or italics to emphasize.
Pages are distracting: too many fonts/styles/mismatched graphics clutter the site.	Site goals have been forgotten in favor of adding everything one can think of to the site.	Simplify. You may need to reorganize some pages, cut back on varying fonts or graphics (or make them more consistent).

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