Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Brilliant post Eoghan - was just trying to work out if our homepage was getting too big to download - glad to say we are about middle of your list! Thanks for the analysis.

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Welcome to the age of broadband! Obviously the experience won't be perfect for someone on a slow connection but, for almost everyone, it'll be just fine. As the developer of the Organic Supermarket site, yes I am somewhat biased. I'm also aware that Flash widgets, font replacement techniques, etc. can 'bloat' a site. For the Organic Supermarket, for example, emphasis was placed on the brand and 'look' - and the designer made this very clear before we started development.

As for your iPhone issue. Personally I've never even come close to reaching my monthly download allocation... and I use it on-the-go all the time! Also, we don't have Flash to contend with.

I don't really understand the point of this post to be honest. Unless you're living on an island off the West Coast on dial-up and Flash and widgets are genuinely ruining your online experience, then it's hard to fathom why bloat is one of your 'pet peeves'.

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Ken, the truth of the matter is that in Ireland the experience will NOT be "just fine" for "almost everyone". Only last month the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society in Harvard University published results of a surveyed on Internet connectivity in 30 OECD countries. Of the 30 OECD countries Ireland came 27th out of 30. Poland, Turkey and Mexico were behind us. Among those who scored better than us were the Czech and Slovak republics. See the full report here (the table on p58 is instructive)

While many power users of the web - bloggers, those working in IT, rabid tweeters - are used to their access to broadband, there are way too Irish people not so lucky, certainly compared to much of the OECD. Only when we are appearing in the top 10 of such tables will there be a reason for me to drop this from my (pedantic!) list of 'pet peeves'.

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Speaking in relative terms, rather than comparing ourselves to other countries or using surveys, how many people in the country do you think will have difficulty with any of the sites above?

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Ken, I think we talking we're talking hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland who will have problems visiting the bloated or 'bonkers' sites. Obviously there are the 80% of the population that simply do not have broadband. Now among those 80% you will have people who have access to internet but via a 56k dialup modem (...they are still out there, especially in rural Ireland...) or a mid-band package (or what is misleadingly marketed as "Mobile Broadband" - misleading as the average throughput to all users connected to a mast is about 1/5th to 1/20th of the peak speed, and it is the peak mast speed that is used in marketing blurbs for mobile "broad" band).

At the end of the day, when websites are being designed they should take into account those who are not on broadband (i.e. who are on mid-band or less). It is not a coincidence that the home pages of leading global sites such as google and bing are slim.

All the same I appreciate that a designer who places an emphasis on brand and 'look' can be a headache for a developer as it can steer you towards a heavier overall file size. In such a case I'd see it as an opportunity to educate the designer about the impact of translating their super slick vision into reality (in the case of Organic Supermarket this resulted in a rather bloated 1.3MB home page). My guess is that an fair minded designer would be open to toning down the super slick vision, while maintaining key elements of branding, all in order to have a snappier website and more positive user expeirence. Would you agree?

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

I can't say I do agree, no. While Organic Supermarket certainly contains the most 'bloat' of any site I've ever coded, the resultant return has been well worth it. Aside from the jerky FLIR implementation, I'm pretty happy with how it's worked out all in all. For those on slow connections, the site will degrade gracefully should they choose to disable Flash, JavaScript, etc. I'm assuming that those of us who build 'bloated' sites follow best practice for the most part so and that those unfortunate folk who are still stuck on dial-up or painfully slow connections are aware of how to make the most of their online experience.

The alternative, I suppose, is to go back the stone age. Every site is text-based, no enhancement, no rich media, use Lynx as your default testing client, etc, etc. Okay, so I'm being facetious but my point is - who decides what's too much bloat and what isn't? How much is too much client side script? How much Flash is too much? What weight should pages be and do we need to determine this on a country-by-country basis? Should all our sites cater for those on dial-up, regardless of their browser configuration?

To be fair Eoghan, I do agree with you to a point and I generally appreciate backwards compatibility, catering for the 'lowest common denominator', inclusiveness, etc. I'm just wondering who draws the line and sets the standard?

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Brilliant article Eoghan and very interesting.

One website that everyone here in UCD is going mad about is the Facebook Status Generator website. The hits that it has been receiving in this campus alone must surely put it for an award.

www.theisbook.com/status-generator/

Keep up the good work mate

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Jaysus, I got a fright there. I've definitely been neglecting my pages sizes. I've added compression, removed whitespace in external files and removed JS files which just weren't been used anymore. It's now down to 717KB, near half of what it was. Still not very small but an improvement.

Thanks for the reminder.

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Excellent analysis, Eoghan.

As one of those people in supposedly mid-band or even broadband Ireland, but whos speed can reduce significantly from the quoted 3MB package speed to <100k at certain times of the evening. Therefore Ken, if I was on one of these such "bloated" sites around such a time, I'd be forced to abandon browsing, to be honest...

I think that it's reasonable to expect designers to be efficient with their designs and using good design practices without overloading the site. For example, Curious Wines is designed by Sabrina Dent and imho this is a fabulously visual and functional site, which is also one of the slim and fit sites in this analysis.

I don't imagine that I'm alone in my sometime BB difficulties, and indeed when I travel and use a 3G modem, I would again prefer to browse slimmer sites which would provide a more rewarding experience.

If this type of approach was used as part of the site design & construction criteria, I'm sure we'd all be much happier in our browsers ;)

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

All suggestions noted. May we all strive to improve the standard of Irish Web design. Or at least to critique it ;)

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

@Niall: nice work on slimming down the site by half!

@John P: I think your point that you would prefer to "browse slimmer sites which would provide a more rewarding experience" is something developers / designers should ignore at their peril. Encouraging repeat visits is a function of many factors, one of which I truly believe is the time it takes for the site to set itself up in your browser. Many of us are an impatient lot when on the web. A slim site will keep us happy at least in terms of a zippy browser experience, and we'd be then more open to bookmarking it and returning to it.

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

Hi Eoghan,
I was involved in the Dance Ireland site, so I was most concerned to see such a huge page size in your report.

However, on investigating this, I discovered that the tool on websiteoptimization.com includes unused background images referenced in the CSS file in the total page size, which grossly distorts the figures for Dance Ireland.

When I use various tools in Firefox to check the total page size (Firebug, Google's page speed tool and Yahoo's YSlow tool), they all report a file size under 240Kb - not super skinny granted, but nearly 10 times smaller than the 2Mb figure!

Re: Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

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