Rick Howard

One would think the election in 2004 would have helped the democratic party from so much flip-flopping but alas, it seems Obama has now taken up where John Kerry left off.

Take a look at the 2 screenshots below:

How does one go from beautiful smooth fonts and styling to the organized chaos of the second image? How could a presidential candidate allow his initally smooth facade be desecrated by fonts, in different weights and sizes and faces. Is this the work of a over-eager campaign worker at 2am who is just trying to get a glimpse of the presidential hopeful or just design gone wrong? I have another suspect, The Content Management System!

I have found that most CMS’s allow a little too much in the way of customization. Giving your clients full access to edit their sites may seem like a good idea at first, but quickly you find that the inexperienced can find many ways of “improving” their websites. Improvements that can make or break a design.

With ARCedit, our custom CMS, we restrict our users from blink tags, red fonts on green backgrounds and abnormally sized images in order to keep the designs as clean as we can. It may be a lot of hand holding, but the payoff is in not compromising your designs.

Thus establishing your platform, keeping it organized and getting your point across without confusing your future constituents.

Chinese Olympian is 13.

Apparently “He Kexin” is only 13 years old and should not be eligible for the Olympics which means, the whiny US Gymnastics team will probably be given the gold. That isn’t the biggest problem I have with the article. What is more confusing is ESPNs need to repeatedly use the gymnasts first name, He.

So you end up getting gems like, “If the age reported by Xinhua was correct, that would have meant He was too young to be on the Chinese team that beat the United States on Wednesday and clinched China’s first women’s team Olympic gold in gymnastics. She is also a favorite for gold in Monday’s uneven bars final.”

ESPN definitely is not short of a sense of humor, but why not change the gymnasts last name throughout the article. The Associated Press usually doesn’t mind small edits for clarification purposes but instead we are stuck with a confusing mix of shes and hes, which would leave one to question whether the athlete was too young or of the wrong gender for the sport they participated in.

I’m glad that ARC employs a full time copywriter to avoid pitfalls like this and insure all of our clients get their message across clearly.