May 25th, 2010 4:04 am by Vincent Flanders
Submitter’s comments: My friend sent this to me when she was looking into the college. You would think with all the money they get from tuition they would be able to afford a web page that wasn’t made by an 11-year old boy.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: I could excuse the page if it were designed by an 11-year old. I should excuse it because it’s for an art school but, because some irresponsible dickhead doesn’t understand that flashing colors could cause seizures, I have to make it a Daily Sucker. Oh. The word “irresponsible” in the phrase “irresponsible dickhead” is an unnecessary modifier.
What in the hell was s/he thinking? Hopefully, outing them might cause the page to be changed.
Yale School of Art (WARNING. Could cause seizures)
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |
May 11th, 2010 2:02 am by Vincent Flanders
Vincent Flanders’ comments: For some reason, I decided to look at the White House’s home page. The top part of the page looks fine but, as I went down the page, the old bugaboo about contrast popped up. It’s especially problematic because the White House has a link at the bottom of the page that discusses accessibility . Ironically, the link is hard to read because of the lack of contrast.
I ran the page through AccessColor and was told:
Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 2.88% of the total text.
Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 20.77% of the total the text.
Text on background with images is for 47.93% of the total text. (Which makes it impossible for them to figure out the contrast levels.)
Here’s a screen capture of the results for those who don’t want to rerun the test.
As far as how well the site performs, I ran the home page through Zoompf and here were the results:
Performance issues with the home page
of whitehouse.gov
|
Critical |
High |
Medium |
Low |
1 |
14 |
14 |
16 |
Here’s a screenshot of Zoompf’s analysis.
On a more positive note: Whitehouse.gov scored 72 (C) on Yslow and scored an 81 on Page Speed.
Whitehouse.gov
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design |
April 20th, 2010 3:03 am by Vincent Flanders
Today, April 20 — which is Hitler’s birthday — seems like a good time to talk about a disturbing trend in web design.
Read the article
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design |
April 9th, 2010 5:05 pm by Vincent Flanders
As I said in a previous post Google is using your site’s speed in its web search rankings — kind of. It’s only partially implemented and only for English queries — right now. Search Engine Land has an excellent non-Google take on the matter.
OK, you’ve found out your site’s loading speed sucks, what do you do?
There are lots of things you can do to speed up your web site. I think the three steps you can take that will improve your site’s performance more quickly (and perhaps have the greatest impact on your site’s speed) are:
- Remove as many f*cking third-party widgets as your boss will let you. Steve Souders’ Performance of 3rd Party Content article states:”Ads, widgets, and analytics are a major cause for slow web sites. P3PC is a project focused on analyzing the performance of 3rd party content. The goal is to find the key wins to evangelize to make 3rd party content faster.”The two worst offenders on his 6-item list are: the Digg widget ad Google’s AdSense. Obviously, Google won’t downgrade you for using AdSense.
His list is far from complete (he’s just starting) and I’ve personally found that the Snap widget, Techmeme widget, Twitter Flash widget, and the Amazon widget that display books are all bandwidth hogs.
- Cache your files— Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header. Yahoo! covers the topic. Information on how to do it is difficult to find and implement. Most articles assume you are a professional system administrator with root access.Here are some articles that I’ve found useful for normal people:
Sample Apache cache configuration
Caching Tutorial
Speed up your site with Caching and cache-control
- Compress your web page components. As Yslow states:”Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.”Here are articles that I’ve found useful for normal people:
Use mod_deflate to Compress Web Content delivered by Apache
Adding GZIP Compression To Your Site Via .htaccess
Redbot is an important tool to help you see details about your site. Here’s what you see when you visit my articles page and here’s what you see when you click check your assets (really important).
I also find Zoompf’s blog very useful and, of course, Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites.
Posted in Daily Sucker |
April 9th, 2010 4:04 pm by Vincent Flanders
Yes, it’s finally happened. Google is using your site’s page loading speed in its web search rankings — kind of. It’s only partially implemented and only for English queries — right now. Search Engine Land has an excellent non-Google take on the matter.
The Google article lists various tools to help you evaluate your site’s speed. Page Speed and Yslow are two addons for the Firebug plugin for Firefox. These tools are extremely valuable because they analyze “web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance.” Performance is this year’s black.
Crappy looking sites. In my view, the problem with rewarding web speed is that lots of sites that are the worst sites and worst looking sites on the Internet might see an improvement in search results because they load faster.
Yes, I know that Page Load Time is a minor, minor factor. Still, it seems bizarre that crappy looking sites will get any kind of bonus for loading faster.
Sites That Suck – Ranked by Page Speed Score
Not crappy looking sites. The following is a list of some well-known sites:
Content Rich Sites – Ranked by Page Speed Score
Jeez. The New York Times scores lower than the turd pile called Yvette’s. Yes, I know content is rewarded.
Irony. I measured the page load speed of three companies who provide performance tuning. Very interesting results.
Three companies that perform Web Site Performance Tuning:
Domain |
Page Speed Score |
Yslow Score |
|
|
|
Company 1 Home Page |
91 |
86 (B) |
Company 2 Home Page |
73 |
65 (D) |
Company 3 Home Page |
88 |
77 (C) |
Posted in Daily Sucker |