Web Pages That Suck - learn good web design by looking at bad web design

Submitter’s comments: Enjoy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Personally, I prefer more commentary when submitters send in a site; however, I’ll overlook the dearth of analysis because I’ve finally been shown a website that reaches zero on the Page Speed performance index. Briefly, Page Speed “evaluates the performance of web pages and get suggestions on how to improve them.” Today’s Daily Sucker needs a lot of improving.

If you look at the screenshot I took of the Page Speed score for the site’s home page, you’ll see it’s 12 (out of 100). The major problem is the site improperly scales images. The site wastes almost 2Mb because they take an image that’s 2738 x 1353 pixels and use HTML to fit in a 544 x 400 pixel space. The site uses the same technique on seven other images on the home page..

Interestingly, Page Speed Online gives the site a score of zero. That’s right. Zero. Houston, we’ve hit bottom. There’s probably an interesting story on the different scores, but it’s too hard to find anyone at Google to speak with. Yslow, another performance test product from Yahoo!, gives the home page a score of B (84). Obviously, these two programs think certain performance issues are more important than others.

The site has a whole host of other problems. No logo. Centered text on the home page, but flush-left text on the Speaker page (possibly others), an animated globe (why?), underscored text that isn’t a link, a lack of navigation and other issues.

<ADHD moment>IE 9 doesn’t seem to handle named anchor text correctly. When you click the scales images link, you don’t end up at the correct spot.</ADHD moment>.

Jack Laurie