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Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry: Not the Ministry of Websites

January 24, 2007
By Ken Worsley


A not-so serious post:

I went to Japan’s Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) website to check out their Index of Tertiary Industries Report. Now, I don’t expect government websites to win design or usability awards, but this is something else. I landed on the page using Firefox. Since large portions are unreadable (black text on a black background?) without pressing Control+A to select all text on the screen, I nearly gave up looking at it. Then I realized it was most likely designed for Internet Explorer and used that to check the link. Of course it’s in frames, but that’s easy enough to break.

The above link is not in frames. Check it out with IE and Firefox. Either way it’s bad, but who reads the Index of Tertiary Industries Report anyway?

Filed Under Econ Light, METI 

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Comments

3 Responses to “Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry: Not the Ministry of Websites”

  1. Durf on January 24th, 2007 8:26 pm

    Shows up fine in Safari . . . Nice use of “Microsoft FrontPage 5.0″ (see the source for the page) on that vital government website.

  2. Rick Lonze on August 2nd, 2007 1:13 am

    If you highlight the section the text is visible

  3. Ken Worsley on August 2nd, 2007 1:57 am

    That’s true. It’s an old SEO trick, puts lots of text the same color as the background and hitting control A will show it. Anyway, you could also read the source code and get the info, once the frame’s broken…

    …Or they could make a real website.

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