8th
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.
