www.thephatjoeshow.tv

Phat Joe, that guy on tv with the big lips, has a new website: www.thephatjoeshow.tv, and naturally I would have something to say about it.

The first thing I noticed were the 'Font size' and 'Tool Box' widgets featured prominently in the right-hand column. Clicking on either of the 'A' graphics alongside the 'Font size' item does what one would expect - the HTML text on the page is increased/decreased in size. Several flaws, though:

a) There are only two sizes to choose from - unlike for example, wired.com, which has four.
b) The difference between the two sizes is not significant enough to make the function useful to anyone who would use it in the first place.
c) The size you choose is not remembered when you navigate to another page, so you'd have to keep changing it every time if the small difference it makes really mattered to you.

As for the 'Tool box' widgets, "Add to Favourites" and "Make Me your home page": it's a big trend for sites to include these options in their design, even though they are native functions of the Browser UI - including changing the 'Font size'. Why replicate something in your site design that is already accessible via the browser and works so much better?

FYI, the "open external links in a new window" widget on my site, which wasn't working properly anyway (I modified it at some stage based on this article), is also an existing implementation in most modern browsers - users just need to learn that it's there.