I try to use this site for positive tips, tricks & posts about web development. No, really. I do. But every now and then I come across a site so horrible, so incomprehensibly broken, that I just need to call them out by name: Dish Network.

Dish Network’s website is an unmitigated disaster of usability and UI. Clearly born out of some corporate design committee, this customer goodwill-burning, will-to-live-sapping site employs some of the worst design and UI practices out there. In the end, they violate the number one rule in business: Never make it hard for a customer to give you money. But along the way, they put up every conceivable obstacle to achieving even the most simple task possible.

For starters, they use Flash-based logins. I personally believe that Flash-based logins are evil and pointless. They block accessibility and prevent use of password managers like 1Password. But in this case, it’s especially bad because there is no fall-back if you don’t have Flash installed. No Flash? You’re screwed. iPhone/iPad users? Fuck you. Users who have plug-ins disabled? Bitez moi. ClickToFlash users? Sit on it.

Next up: Mac users, you must not exist. Inexplicably, the site is very broken in all three major browsers on the Mac. Images fail to load. Accessibility support is inconsistent or outright broken. Every Flash-based button is broken because the sans font is different on the Mac and nobody at Dish bothered to check. I’m sure it works in IE6, though.

But here’s the ultimate kicker: You cannot do anything on this piece of shit site with regard to your bill. After logging in, all your account options are locked out (you know this because the broken button labels are a slightly darker shade of gray than they normally are). So all roads lead to the account profile page. After some trial and error, you have to figure out on your own that you must scroll to the bottom and re-enter all your login credentials (keeping in mind that you’re *already* logged in). First they kick you in the left nut by making it look like you’re resetting your account with an entirely new password. Then they finish the job with a Flash-based form that uses a different password validator than the main Flash-based form. Even if you wanted to enter a new password, you can’t reset your account because the form won’t validate your existing password. This effectively locks you out of the account and prevents further changes, online bill pay, auto-payment setup or any other means of managing your account. So if you happened to, say, use an exclamation mark in your password, you’re done. Game over. Pack it up. Go home. Or should I say, “Go home!”

The site has been this way for the two+ years I’ve been a customer. It’s a good thing I enjoy their HD programming or I would have kicked them to the long ago. I won’t pretend that someone at Dish will read this post and suddenly make the necessary changes, but it sure does feel good to rant.

Time to step up onto my organic soap box.

If your spouse is like mine, you have been empowered with the awesome responsibility of entering the HGTV Dream Home and Green Home Give-Aways day after day, year after year.

Until this latest contest, it hasn’t been a problem. At the start of each contest, I set up an Automator workflow to run each night and I’m done.

Until, that is, Scripps decided to resort to some serious douchebaggery with their latest Green Home Give-Away.

Violation #1) Use of non-standard form elements. Specifically, they override standard functionality of their select menus, input and radio buttons.

The result: accessibility is tossed out the window. Typical highlight cues are overridden and omitted, leaving it nearly impossible to navigate the form using keyboard commands.

(Egregious) Violation #2) with some JavaScript tom-foolery, the entry form requires that you manually scroll down, down, down, down, down past all the superfluous offers to get to…once again… a non-standard button element (see #1 above).

Now some of you will say that I shouldn’t be writing an Automator script to mimic human behavior and that I’m depriving Scripps of my precious eyeballs. I would argue that during the hour or so it took me to set up the script (attempted to do so in this latest case), each and every brand impression is well and truly burned into both retinas and that daily impressions no longer matter. I would also argue against the implicit assumption that the Marketeers over at Scripps have a right, moral or otherwise, to my mindshare. But this would be missing the point.

Using non-standard elements and throwing accessibility out the window with the explicit intent to force the visitor into a particular action is web usability at its worst. There are cleaner, standards-compliant methods to accomplish their (dubious) goals without leaving visually impaired users in the dust.

Bottom line: the project managers making the decisions at Scripps should be ashamed of themselves. Here’s to hoping they don’t make the same mistake for the next contest.