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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: How do you warm you house at winter?
Snuggling. 
Marc
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Consider an organization comprised of humans who are...
- Highly Intelligent
- Diligent
- Thrilled by improving their own skills
- Striving for the company's good
- Delighted with their workplace environment
- Eager to see progress, both personally and corporately
That same organization has a website which...
- Doesn't help anyone (sales, H-R, vendors, customers, anyone)
- Overwhelms the viewer
- Absolutely eliminates human concentration
- Has a structure so complex that nobody gets it
- Increases calls to support
- Confuses almost everybody who views it
What do you believe are the factors which cause this ?
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And a pain in all the diodes down its left side?
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I think one reason might be responsibility and organization. You need to make clear decisions to get a good structure if there are a lot of people working within the same environment to prevent bloating. If you can't figure out how to integrate in the current structure while adhering to this you might have to increase the scope and refactor. Those that work have to recognize this and have access to managers / eight balls that can take a decision to do what's necessary.
I also think that this site probably has had a lot of stuff added to it as time progresses without watching it from the users perspective. Someone came with input that adding A would be good and the diligent workers did so, then someone wanted B and C which also was added without looking at the needs these functions fill or how they would be used.
I would look at the site from the perspective off each type (sales, H-R, etc) and create scenarios on what they want to achieve with each visit. Complement this list by querying users to come up with different scenarios. Then have someone that doesn't know much about the site try and navigate each of them too see what problems comes up.
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Maybe all those good people can't play as a team...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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In my experience, the problem is this: The web designers will ask the company: "What do you want your site to look like? What content should be included? How should it be structured? What functionality do you want on your site?" - and the answer to all of these questions is the same "Well, WE don't know - you're the web designer, aren't you?"
So the web designers design something they THINK the company will like, often with no regard to the user experience, and often even without any knowledge of the companys business.
And very often, they will use the newest, fanciest techniques without stopping to think if it is really necessary or even wanted in the specific case - just because they can, and because they want to train a little for future jobs - Leaving the company with a website that's way too complicated, that they can neither use nor maintain.
To get it right, it's imperative that the company person responsible for overseeing the website design has the knowledge of how a website works and how webdesign works (even if he may not be able to program it himself) - as well as a good knowledge on what is possible and what is not - and is up to date on web design techniques. And that is hardly ever the case.
Just my 5 cents... 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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Yes, this. Almost every project I've worked on (I'm the only developer for a small automotive manufacturing company) is exactly as described. Quality wants a new 'system', and they think that I should know everything about their job and be able to create the perfect system to streamline their processes. I write it, and then spend about twice as much time adding/removing features to create the system they should have thought about and asked me to build in the first place.
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@Johnnyy J.
I completely agree with your points.
I have been writing about this issue for many years; especially when it comes to the divide between ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.
The adoption of the MVC standard in the .NET environments made everything more complex, less intuitive, and far more detailed than it has to be. True, WebForms may not be as efficient in some respects but it is a mature technology, which is now seen as old and "uncool". As a result, newer developers are rushing to try out every cantankerous JavaScript tool they can get their hands on.
I just upgraded my own business site to one that is now built with "responsive design"; the template was designed by AllWebCo Design. I converted it to ASP.NET WebForms with practically no issues using all of the standard tools and AJAX. Though the site now works quite well I did notice a drop in the efficiency of the load times compared to straight WebForms. This is a result of the increased usage of JavaScript and CSS.
Individually, many of the new tools are quite decent but together they create a polyglot set of development environments that add a lot of strain to the websites that are built with them. Add to this the increased complexities and efficiency will go down in general. Take a look at the news sites that now often take forever to load simply because of long running scripts and poor design.
A lot of this is what is now being incorporated into business websites and web applications in general creating poor results.
The reaction to this is a very slow movement back to something akin to WebForms as tool vendors attempt to create similar tools for the MVC world that we already have with WebForms; and with much less complexity.
As I have also stated in my writings several times, until the underlying foundations of a technology changes (ie: Internet), the tools used to process applications on these foundations will only be able to generate so much efficiency, no matter which ones are used.
This is why I have found it so inane that the profession has so willy-nilly dropped proven technologies for unproven new tools that really yield very few differences in the final product. The results are showing...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Outsourcing the web site to a bunch of self abusers. Or, not outsourcing it to a good web design and development shop.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. - Liber AL vel Legis 1:40, Aleister Crowley
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Basically what I said, only in a lot fewer words... 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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C-P-User-3 wrote: What do you believe are the factors which cause this ?
Silly questions in QA. 
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The marketing department.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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A butterfly beating its wings in Brazil.
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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Sounds like the fruit of what some organizations call the "good idea fairy".
Oh, and no actual development process being used. "Just code it, it's only a web site!" 
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Many sites I see lately all come from a similar template.
The template doesn't apply to all solutions.
I would believe that management never uses their site.
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C-P-User-3 wrote: Consider an organization comprised of humans
The answer is in the question!
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Training from Microsoft?
Will Rogers never met me.
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Not enough head cooks. Everybody knows the soup is better when you have lots of head cooks all adding the ingredients they think will make it better.
Yeah, I'm being metaphorical and sarcastic.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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SharePoint. 
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Same issue with the website of a company I recently worked for. Basically the CEO thought he could design it, but has no skills at organization or structure. Then gave it to a "creative" company without any requirements. They basically took the old website, and filled it with all kinds of multimedia. Again, no structure or organization (as expected with no requirements). The one item that the CEO was proudest of was a video (that takes forever to load) that is shown every time you go to the website!
I now am contracting to the company, and one of things I may be working on is fixing this website (gotta love billable hours).
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The boss's kid knew a guy, etc.
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Management standing over the web programmer with a whip, staring at his watch, and saying, "Upper management has decided the web will be put online at the end of the day."
That's been my experience.
I've had web sites that took over a month to write in Classic ASP be scheduled to be converted to ASP.NET in only a week by management without bothering to consult with me on how long it would take.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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I couldn't think of anything, despite Trojan efforts, and I'm no Johnny-come-lately at this.
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