Worst Websites
Weill Cornell Medical College – Example of Bad Web Design for Thursday, April 15, 2010
April 15th, 2010 4:04 am by Vincent Flanders
Submitter’s comments: I found your site as part of the therapy I needed after a colleague asked, “Have you seen the med college site lately?” I’d like to draw your attention to our Medical College “redesign” in NYC. It was bad before. Now, I’m not quite sure what to say…
Vincent Flanders’ comments: How about saying, “It sucks.” I’m sure the graffiti on the front page means something to somebody, but that somebody isn’t me and it probably isn’t you. AccessColor says that Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 9.7% of the total text. Tsk Tsk.
I ran the site through Zoompf’s Mini Performance Assessment Tool and was informed that Cornell Medical had the following problems:
| Severity | Issue Name | Affected pages |
| Critical | Content Served Without HTTP Compression | 19 |
| High | Adjacent Images | 1 |
| High | Combinable CSS Images | 1 |
| High | Combinable Image Map | 2 |
| High | Combinable Scripts | 2 |
| High | Combinable Style Sheets | 2 |
| High | Image Without Caching Information | 104 |
| High | Invalid Content for Image | 1 |
| High | Out of Date Software (jQuery) | 1 |
| High | Script Without Caching Information | 5 |
| High | Static HTML Not Minified | 2 |
| High | Style Sheet Without Caching Information | 9 |
| High | Unoptimized Image (GIF) | 5 |
| High | Unoptimized Image (JPG) | 35 |
| High | Unoptimized Image (PNG) | 52 |
| High | Unparallelized Downloads | 2 |
| Medium | Commented Out HTML | 2 |
| Medium | CSS Not Minified (External File) | 9 |
| Medium | Excessive HTML Comments | 2 |
| Medium | High Quality JPEG Image | 37 |
| Medium | Image Tags Without Dimensions | 2 |
| Medium | JavaScript Not Minified (External File) | 4 |
| Medium | Missing Resource (Image) | 1 |
| Medium | PNG8 Candidate Image (Color Count) | 16 |
| Medium | PNG8 Candidate Image (Size) | 36 |
| Medium | Print Media Style Sheet Detected | 2 |
| Medium | Unoptimized Resource Location (Script) | 2 |
| Low | <SCRIPT SRC> Without Defer | 2 |
| Low | Default ETag Format Detected | 119 |
| Low | Excessive <META> Tag Contents | 1 |
| Low | Excessive Absolute URLs (External Link) | 2 |
| Low | Excessive DOM Size | 2 |
| Low | Excessive Hidden Inputs (Number) | 1 |
| Low | Invalid HTML Tag in <HEAD> | 1 |
| Low | JavaScript Dynamic Compilation (eval) | 1 |
| Low | JavaScript Not Minified (<SCRIPT> Block) | 1 |
| Low | Place Holder Image | 6 |
| Low | Potentially Cacheable Image (iPhone) | 3 |
| Low | Potentially Cacheable Text Response (iPhone) | 2 |
| Low | Robots.txt Without Crawl-Delay | 1 |
| Low | Uncacheable Response (iPhone) | 41 |
Hopefully, the full report is still up. For a sucky web page, it had low scores on Page Speed (71) and Yslow (59).
I took a look at an older version of the Cornell Med home page at Archive.org and, yes, the new site is much worse. If you click on Departments, you’ll get one of those lightboxes with all the links. Choosing “Headache Center” sends you to a page where there are no (obvious) links back to where you came from — the home page.
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design |