blowing off steam

Your Website Sucks, Pt. 1: CrunchGear

This is the first article in what I hope will be a series of raving rants against websites that suck. And not sites that just suck (there are way too many) but sites that, but for one fundamental failing, could otherwise be a decent experience.

I am having a particularly bad evening. It was 92F, ~85% humidity and I worked outside most of the day. I came in and sat on the couch with a beer and my jesusPhone and wanted to do some recreational browsing. Well CrunchGear ruined it for me.

I started out with my standard Twitter, which at this point I should know is not a good place to start. After all, it is the weekend, so it is likely that they are having random crashes and data loss. But that went fine. What set me off were a couple of big corporate sites. I started out on a movie service site (which I will not link to because they suck across most aspects or their business. More on that in another article.) then moved to my favorite blog, the minimalist-designed Daring Fireball. He linked to a page that purports to have real pictures of a hotly anticipated new tech device. I’ve been looking at all of these Photoshop masterpieces and wanted to see if this one actually comes close to something that the manufacturer would not flatly reject in first-stage mockups. This is when my night just collapsed.

I’ve been having some difficulty with my ISP after agreeing to pay more for additional bandwidth. With the exception of the hour after after I get home from work, I have actually been getting lower bandwidth since agreeing to let some corporate monster devour more of my paycheck. Now, experiencing a 3.5 minute wait which gave me half a page=load status bar and a blank screen I thought I must be having connection issues. This meant I had to get up to check the gear upstairs. But remember that all I wanted to do was rest on the couch and drink my beer. I ran my first speedtest and got the expected slower-than-I-am-paying-for result, but nothing that should cause a web page to not load in three-and-a-half minutes!

CrunchGear is not a Flash and SQL corporate sales disaster like target.com, it is a blog. A bunch of text on a page, some pictures and some ads. OK, lots of ads. Lots of big, colorful, obnoxious ads. And comments. Lots of big, colorful, obnoxious comments. But the landing page loads as expected. It is when you “jump to the article” that things turn to shit. The article is about a big nerd meme, but I was a day late as this one posted yesterday. When I tried loading it on the desktop, it was still a disaster. It loaded so slow that I could see what was happening. There were quite a few big, grainy pictures in the body of the post but those came up fast enough. The culprit: the comments section. 234 responses (as I am writing), none of which I am the least bit interested in reading. What seems to be going on is some asinine CSS formatting that is being applied during and after (long after) the page loads. Who cares how pretty the comments look? Serve up your fake pictures and drivel and let me get on my way. Give me great content quickly. If I want to waste my time at your site, I’ll read all your crappy articles.

CrunchGear, fix your comments. Better yet, turn them off. Because this is what comments amount to.

Neither your Genius nor your Cute Pre-loader Keep your All-Flash Site from Sucking

My friend over at the mutual slump posted a tumble about the recent Beck/Danger Mouse collaboration.  Clicking his link brought me to the new Beck website but not to the news article about the partnership.  At first I was disappointed by the slump’s inability to make a good link.  Then I realized the real reason; Beck’s site is 100% Flash.

Flash in and of itself is not a wholly terrible thing.  Home Star Runner is a brilliant site that derives much of its cleverness from the animation tools and scripting of Flash (mostly just the animation).  But all-Flash sites fail when there is information to be conveyed.  A musician’s website has to convey biography, discography, news, and tour dates; all text-based information important to generating revenue for the artist.  When this information is hard to access, it potentially reduces revenue streams.  Sites built entirely in Flash only allow other sites to link to the main page.  Once there it is on the user to navigate the site to try and find what they came for.  This situation worsens when the navigational structure is not apparent.

When I went to Beck’s site to find out how Danger Mouse was involved in the new single I was greeted by some cool pre-loaders, some beeps and crackles, and a menu.  As the new single began to play, the menu moved off screen and I was watching Beck on stage; no article, no text of any sort.  I took the cue given at the time of the page-load and found the menu and clicked on the “News” button.  Another animated item dropped down.  Here is where things really fell apart.  I could not figure out how to scroll the news items.  They had just posted the list of tour dates which continued off the small news display area.  I finally saw a minuscule sign that says “Drag Me To Scroll.”  So I clicked on the little sign and the news slate flew off the page.  Turns out I was supposed to grab the item below the sign.  It took me three tries to figure this out.  

The background of the page, the stage that Beck is playing on, is displaying randomly changing items.  The first time I displayed the news slate the background was black.  The scroll item is also black.  See my problem?  When the picture changed to a light color, the item became apparent.  This is just plain poor planning and implementation.  You do want me to read about you, right?  You want me to buy your crap.  Make it easy.  Don’t challenge me.

Here is the conundrum.  You are a great artist and you want to show that in everything you do.  Flash is very powerful and can be used to create amazing products.  But a musician’s website is not a product.  It is a marketing tool to advertise your products.  Amazon makes money had over fist by offering up a site that is easily searchable and offers up simple navigation.  Sure it is ugly, but it serves its task.  I can appreciate that Beck, a retro-soul revivalist, is possibly disinterested in the medium of the web.  If so, offer me up some ‘96-era PageMill text and call it a day.