Christ in a Clown Car

Sep 11 2007

I’ve recently been given the task of keeping the Customer Service website up to date. The CS site is simply the site the Customer Service Reps use to find out about recent changes and latest promotions, as well as where the caller scripts are housed. You would think this wouldn’t be a huge task.

You, like I, would have thought wrong.

It was presented to me like so: once or twice a week, an off-site contractor would be sending me documents that I would have to simply upload to the website, replacing the current document, or, if it was new, adding it to the Table of Contents. Certainly not a big deal, so in the interest of wanting to help and get to know not only the job, but the people better, I accepted.

I should have actually taken a look at the site first.

Picture this: it’s 2007 – you work in a place that deals with products that are online. The whole business is online. You’d think the people here would’ve kept up with the changes and technology that has weaved its way through web development in the last 10 years. Again, you’d think wrong.

When I first opened the site, it was like being thrown back into 1996. First thing I couldn’t help but notice is the frames. Yes, frames – left top and main. Next, is the BLINKING text stating who the “rep of the month” is. Animated gifs of fireworks exploding. Liberal use of javascript to do nothing worthwhile (the person before me thought it’d be cool to have the title of the page rotate through different sayings, such as “check out the in-house website!” or “page created by so-and-so”). Two words described my immediate reaction to the site.

Holy shit.

Immediately followed was the thought “what have I gotten myself into?” I looked deeper into the structure, and found even more to curl the toe-hairs. The site consists of:

29 top-level sub-directories (I haven’t counted further in)
3,338 Images
1175 HTML docs
75 .doc and .xls files.

The site itself is somewhere in the neighborhood of 9gb in size.

9 freakin’ GIGAbytes.

And then further exploration determined that while one of the sub-directories was indeed an images directory, there are image sub directories in several other places, not to mention random images scattered all over the damn place. Oh, and the most helpful thing? They’re named stuff like “imageABC.jpg, imageXYZ.jpg”

And it’s not like the site was done with a CMS or anything – no, all those 1,175 HTML docs were hand coded.

But I’ve saved the best for last. See, the sub-contractor I mentioned earlier, she sends me Word documents. The guy who had this job before me discovered the wonderful ease with which one can take a Word doc and save it as an HTML page. Yup, File > Save as Web Page, easy as that, no problems as far as he was concerned.

Have any of you all actually seen what the code looks like when you do that? It’s horrifying. Here’s a quick example:

<html xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 11">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 11">
<link rel=File-List href="Hello%20World_files/filelist.xml">
<title>Hello World</title>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Author>Data Center</o:Author>
<o:Template>Normal</o:Template>
<o:LastAuthor>Data Center</o:LastAuthor>
<o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Created>2007-09-11T16:26:00Z</o:Created>
<o:LastSaved>2007-09-11T16:26:00Z</o:LastSaved>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>1</o:Words>
<o:Characters>11</o:Characters>
<o:Company>ORCC</o:Company>
<o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>11</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>11.8132</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:SpellingState>Clean</w:SpellingState>
<w:GrammarState>Clean</w:GrammarState>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
</w:Compatibility>
<w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156">
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<style>
<!--
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
</head>

<body lang=EN-US style='tab-interval:.5in'>

<div class=Section1>

<p class=MsoNormal>Hello World</p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

If you read through that, you know I typed ‘Hello World’ into a Word doc, and used the Save as Web Page feature.

It’s enough to make me cry.

4 responses so far