Canterbury Cross II

As was noted in The Lead back in August, there's an ironically named image on the homepage of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It's been there since the image of the TIME magazine cover of the archbishop went up on his homepage. Follow the link to the homepage above and hover your mouse over the image. Or, if that doesn't work for you, follow this link to a static popup image of the homepage.

The subliminal message? It could be that the Archbishop of Canterbury is cross with his flock. Or it could be that his homepage needs some sprucing up and updating; notice that if you follow the link titled "Archbishop Williams and current events" you get information from events in 2004, 2003, and 2002 but nothing more recent.

And is anyone else bothered by the way the left margin on some of the pages follows you as scroll down? I find it a distracting gadget. Here's an example:
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/releases/index.html.
Click and scroll to see the dizzying effect.

Posted by John B. Chilton on December 5, 2007 9:17 AM | |
Comments (4)

Page cleanup alert! A few minutes of updating the mouseovers is all that is needed. But wait a minute...

The reason that you don't get that for the current onlinepage is that they removed the mouseovers from their hypertext language! How lazy can you get?

And I agree with you that those moving scrolls are a distraction.

Alice MacArthur

Posted by A L MacArthur [TypeKey Profile Page] | December 5, 2007 9:48 AM

The phrase "A graphic of the Canterbury Cross" is the Alt text attribute for the Time Magazine cover image. This text is intended for the benefit of vision impaired readers who are using screen readers to access the page. Internet Explorer displays this text as a tooltip, even though it is not intended as such. Firefox, which follows web standards more closely, does not display the text. For a discussion of the web design issues see this article.

In any case, the text is poorly chosen. I wonder if the web designer is embedding his own commentary.

Posted by Paul Martin [TypeKey Profile Page] | December 5, 2007 11:13 AM

Found the offending alt= an image of the Canterbury Cross when I viewed the page source.
Apparently they had an image of the Canterbury Cross there prior to the putting in the image of the magazine cover, because if you click on the magazine cover you will find another page that does have the Cross.

Anyway re: my previous comment regarding mouseovers, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!"

Alice MacArthur

PS. The article referred to shows that they tend to violate the idea of tooltips too, in that the descriptions are not describing the meaning, but describing the image which if seen is also supposed to show the meaning, ex. "an image of a stack of newspapers" instead of "news."

Posted by A L MacArthur [TypeKey Profile Page] | December 5, 2007 6:23 PM

I agree with J.B. about the distracting gadget in the left column. The Archbishop's entire homepage is in dire need of a graphics overhaul.

Posted by Douglas LeBlanc [TypeKey Profile Page] | December 6, 2007 9:27 AM

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