A canticle or two for AWN.

The excellent Tim Brittain-Gatlin reminds me that the official site for A. W. N. Pugin, the sublime neo-gothicist and Ramsgate-based looter of wrecks is actually at www.pugin-society.org. You enter the url and there is a shadowy photo of the man on a pale purple background with a kind of contents list around the left side and the top. Behind all this is a fluorescent aquamarine background. Aaaaagh. Hastily you click on 'how to use this site' and peer through the murk of dark purple or maybe dark blue sans-serif text on the grey/purple background. Enlarging the text (full marks, however, for being able to do so) to around 24pt makes everything a bit less illegible--until you read the laboured explanation of how, for example, differently coloured (or sometimes bright blue) text signifies a link to another page. Well I never. The 'News and Views' page has a pale purple-tinted view of his Grange at Ramsgate (at least I think it's that) and some desultory sub-items across the top. 'Links and Lists' must have something in it. It does, but its list of Pugin's works is just that, a list--no images. Hey guys this is the web. Even web usability Calvin, Jakob Neilsen, would allow you to have images, especially thumbnails, especially for sites about people who design things. Pugin aficionados will stick with the Victoria Farrow site at www.pugin.com which is amateur but informative. But someone, please, come to the old sea bandit's rescue. He was, arguably, Britain's most important nineteenth-century architect.