Is this usual?

I’ve been having a bunch of fun (read as: I’m all knackered out) today redoing part of the corporate website, which has been developed by a professional web company.

Now maybe it’s just me, because I edit everything in TextPad (read as: NotePad but useful) but I’ve noticed some rather interesting facts;

1) There’s a toolbar across the top of every single page that has all the drop down menus.  The code for this is entered in every single page, there isn’t a ‘toolbar’ file that’s included.  This makes expanding the toolbar a very labour-some process.
2) Similarly there’s a standard footer, again the code is present in every page.
3) Pages that are identical in every aspect except for some choice text in a table are not formatted and laid out the same when viewing the code.

Now, maybe this is all due to using some WYSIWYG editor, I don’t know… and I’d really like it if someone could tell me?

Par for the course, or terribly bad practise?

On another note, I was doing my Penny Arcade catchup today and noticed a mention to Avant Browser (go on, guess the url!), a tab browser for IE with the fruit.  Like me Tycho had tried FireBird and Opera (though I only needed to see the latter to know I didn’t like it) and realised that all he wanted was IE with blocking and tabbed browsing.

Now you might know, then again, you might not care, that I’m already using MyIE2, which I verily like, however I’m now using Avant and am quite liking it.  It’s almost identical to MyIE2 (who’s copying who?) with the exception that the google search bar comes inbuilt and that popup windows (ones that you want, you understand) aren’t forced to full fricking screen (though they’re still not in a separate instance like with FireBird, which I do like).  Huzzah.

Now if I could just get the text and padding in the toolbars a bit smaller, then it won’t take up so much screen real estate.

And why is it none of these tab browsers behave like Alt-Tab when doing Control-Tab.  They just cycle through the windows… what if I want to swap between two?

Maybe I should have a look at the options before I complain to loud…

Lastly, is it just me or is this page ugly?

@_; ^{– Sordid site makes me sick!}