A few years ago I was working for a small company, preparing their first e-commerce site for their retail shop. Things went well until the day that they presented me with a drawing they had worked up in Illustrator (which they’d just bought) and wanted to use it in place of our agreed-upon layout.

Not that I mind getting design input from clients (quite the contrary!), but their idea was, frankly, something I thought would be a turnoff to customers who came across their site. I felt so strongly about this that I advised them against going in that direction, and we wound up terminating the project at that point.

Now it’s over two years later. They have just recently put up a few placeholder pages, with a design that has a few elements in common with their Illustrator sketch but is much more put-together. I do like the design…

But the designer they hired, that’s another story.

Their designer is building their new site in tables. Must be an old-school developer type who has decided that learning modern, table-less design methods is just not worth the effort, or a graphic designer with a good eye for a cool look and feel but not a lot of web development experience.

The designer is using a font for the headlines and paragraphs that almost no customers are likely to have on their machines. I suspect my former clients are in for a rude awakening when they find out that what looks so good on their computer defaults to Arial, etc. on their visitors’ machines.

This is really too bad. They’re getting a site designed using techniques popular 8 years ago. Their site (so far) is not optimized for search engines, and the designer has already demonstrated that they don’t have a good handle on even basic web-friendly fonts. Usability is fair, but the cart is not online yet so it’s hard to tell how things will trend. I’ll keep an eye on it for curiosity’s sake.