Over at NewMexiKen, there has been a discussion about the Albuquerque Journal’s awful, awful website. Someone called it an embarrassment to the community, and I agree. I’m not going to waste time collecting screenshots to make my point. I’ll just add here that my latest effort to read a couple of articles online reminds me – if I could only forget, but cannot – just how freakishly awful the Albuquerque Journal website is.

Check it out for yourself. Scan the first page. Notice how it loads in fits and starts. Try to grasp the layout – what’s important on this page? Can you figure that out? Can you relate this page to the front page of the paper itself? Follow a link – any link. Have you ever seen another site like this one?

As a blogger, I like to quote directly from sources on the Web. The Journal website makes this very painful, in part, because it uses linefeeds instead of paragraph codes – quoted text runs together badly. Yeah, it’s a nerdy gripe and the Journal could not care less about pleasing bloggers, but it contributes to my belief that whoever works on this site has never seen another website anywhere. I’m reluctant to beat up a 14-year-old who gets minimum wage, but the Journal could and should do much better than this, especially after so many years of the same awful stuff. Send that kid to classes. Buy him a Dummies book. (Sorry, kid, I know your bosses don’t give a shit.)