Dear Media Temple,

You’re trendy. You’re sleak and sometimes even sexy. And on the rare occasion your support is actually helpful. However for the past 2 weeks your support has sucked ass. Now I don’t mean just a little here and there. I mean big time. I even posted on Get Satisfaction because I wasn’t getting satisfaction with the service I was PAYING for, service that you claim is “Unrivaled”. You want “Unrivaled” support? Go check out USAA or Zappos.com. USAA has gotten some great awards under it’s belt. While Zappos has a rabid fan base of loyal customers. And when I say rabid I really mean it.

Sadly keeping your customers informed or even replying to support requests doesn’t seem to be on the top of your list. You claim that “In many ways you could say our main product is customer support. It’s what we work on the hardest. 90% of our staff is in some way dedicated to this process.” (source) I find this rather hard to believe as I have had a support ticket open since the Oct 15. It is now the 19th. And mind you this isn’t the first incident. I had another ticket open on Oct. 8th and wasn’t closed until the 13th. Quick turn around time there guys.

I’ve hosted with you for over a year now. I always thought you guys were pretty cool. Hosting the An Event Apart after parties. Being pretty cool to hang out with. But really taking 5 days to button up a ticket? That’s just shit. Before I even got a decent reply I had to post on Get Satisfaction. Way to take a pro-active approach to fixing client issues before I had no where else but to the public. I know how PR works. It seems you guys do also, because you were quick to give me 3 months credit on my account. But you pushed me a bit too far and gave me no recourse.

After that was settled, TWO DAYS later I once again had an issue. I hoped that I would get a quick reply seeing as how I was told my experience “is not the norm”. But alas… It appears that shitty service is the norm at Media Temple.

It really makes me wonder what other problems Media Temple has, since their “main product is customer support”.

I’m done with you. I’ve already moved my websites over to a server at Dreamhost.com. It was a pain in my ass to do that. I feel like billing you guys the 20 hours it took to complete. But I’d be happy just to get my money back.

I will never suggest, to anyone who asks about web hosting, that you guys are the way to go. I would though suggest if you want to feel like crap and get crappy customer support, that you guys are the best!

I feel dirty dealing with you,

Andrew Jaswa

The reason

A while ago I got the idea to do some research on font and their usage across the internet. I was trying to figure out what font or typefaces people use and why. To me this is rather interesting because if you have any background in design or typography you’ll know that type conveys meaning and emotion. Would this not be true about the web? Could the typeface of a site convey something about the author or the message they are trying to get across? Maybe something they were feeling when they had it designed? Or maybe there is a corporate style guide that the designer had to follow when building the site? Or maybe that style guide was made with the idea of conveying emotion?

Whew… that’s a lot of questions I have. I’m not got to even try to answer them because, frankly, I can’t. I don’t know what was going through the designers heads. What I can do is survey websites and present the results.

The start

My initial survey was completed in early 2008 with about 100 sites. The sites I first selected were gleaned from the Alexa top 100 sites for the month of January 2008. Since I am from the US, speak English and am interested in western typefaces, I was only interested in English sites. It would be rather hard for me try to figure out different character sets other then Western/Latin. The rest of the sites I pulled were from sites I visit often.

This gave me a wide range of websites from categories of news and social network to retail and design. I figure that 100 sites or so of the whole internet would a fair sample to kick things off. Also I need some very highly and low trafficked sites to get a better idea of how people use type on the web.

The process

I began by going into the CSS and pulling out the *, html and body selectors and seeing what those were set to. In a lot of cases one of those three selectors set the font for the entire site. Great! Job done! Well… sort of. Some sites didn’t have one of those selectors setting the font. So I had to dig some more. Some sites had it set on the p selector, some just had IDs and classes. I ended up going through lots of CSS, some of it nicely organized and some of it downright disgusting.

As anyone who has been working with CSS and browsers for a bit, you would know that for the best results you want to set more then one font in your CSS declarations. So seeing something like this was far from uncommon:
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
I collected all the font information I could because who knows it could be useful at some point. Most of the font stats in this post and in the survey are based on the first font.

The odd bits

While going through the sites I noticed was that some sites would use one type for headings and another type for body text and yet another for their footer. In the case of Coudal Partners out of Chicago, they use Gill Sans for their H1, Times for the rest of their headings and Verdana for most of everything else. Now this puts me in a tight spot. All three faces are in the site, but I can’t then lump a site into a category or group. It got me thinking about what people “would/should/could” be reading the most.

I settled on going with what a majority of the text was set to. In the case of Coudal I settled on Verdana. Why? Because my thought was thus: If I (the user) is going to read, I’m going to read the majority of the text, so I’m going to see that face the most. In turn Verdana was used for a majority of the text in this case. I followed this same thinking for all the other sites I collected data on.

So why did Coudal use three typefaces on their site? I’m not sure but I bet it has something to do with a question I asked before: Could the typeface of a site convey something about the author or the message the are trying to get across?

The interesting bits

Some of the more interesting bits I found were the unbalanced serif to sans-serif ratio. In a sample of 112 sites 8.93% or 10 sites used serif fonts. Of the sites that used sans-serif fonts Arial came out on top with 46 sites. 35 sites had 1 primary font and 2 secondary fonts. 27 had 4 total fonts set. This one amazed me: 1 site (reference.com) had 8 total fonts set. "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
This blew me away. Why would anyone want to set 8 fonts?

Check out the survey

The other week I posted a CSS Baseline. So I’ve decided to create its counterpart: a Markup Baseline. I put some thought into if I should create a markup baseline in the first place. I can’t find any other attempts to create something like this. I believe this is due to the issues I ran into when creating this baseline.

Issues

Purpose

Well formed markup (semantic markup that is) is based on the content. Content is usually based on the purpose of a site. So how would you make a baseline all different kinds of content? You might just end up with a baseline for every different type of website out there. There would be millions of baselines then. And that wouldn’t be very productive.

doctype

Different types of sites may require different doctypes. I thought about making some php functions that would switch the doctype based upon your preference. That seemed a bit more like a framework and out of the scope of this project.

The Baseline

I’ve noticed over the years that I have been creating websites in similar fashion. Websites I’ve created lately have followed a set of ideas that I’ve concocted. The basics of theses ideas start with the structure of the web page. You can usually distill web page structure down to 4 major areas: the header, navigation, the main content area and the footer. Now this doesn’t work in all cases but it should work for most. Again this is an issue with the purpose of the site or page. However most sites will have these 4 elements. In the end I settled on the basic structure of 4 major elements and the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype.

Markup Baseline