ICID Conference Website

ICID – International Conference on Interaction Design (http://iadconference.org) is a conference organized by Tsinghua University, Carnegie Mellon University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It seems to me that the conference is a pretty big deal in the interaction design industry for Asia and China. But when I looked at their official conference website I immediately found a few errors:

• The Chinese main page uses Flash. This is search engine unfriendly. Also, on this page I do not see any critical interactive elements that really need the multimedia power of Flash. The only animated elements are the “Signup” button and the menu mouse-over effect, which can be done completely with standard-compliant technologies like CSS and Javascript.
• Every link I click on the menu pops open a new window, a very common web design “technique” on Chinese websites.
• The English version of the conference main page has spelling errors. For instance, “Signup” is misspelled into “Singnup”. Although this is a minor issue, it looks unprofessional to international conference participants.
• Also, instead of using modern HTML/CSS styling for layout, the English site uses table for layout.
• English page links are broken: Activites, Join, Paper work (what is that?) basically none of them is valid.
• The signup process is not HTTPS secured, not friendly to non-Chinese speakers, and not easy to use.

Perhaps I am being too cranky on web design, smooth interaction and clean coding. But for a conference that targets international design companies, professionals and academia, shouldn’t they try harder to make a positive impression?