Facebook has often been a pretty slow site to use, but since they rolled out the new Chat application, it’s become virtually unusable.

Some testing using Firebug shows the culprits:

1. Images are usually the worst. Thumbnails served from profile.ak.facebook.com or any of the photos-?.ak.facebook.com locations take around 2-5 seconds to download. This is crazy, these files are only around 2-5Kb each. (In fact, that’s even quite large for a thumbnail, they could be made smaller). The slow load times massively affect both the performance and perceived performance of the site.
2. common.js.pkg.php (which clocks in at a whopping 103Kb), takes around 4 seconds to load. The slowest I’ve recorded was 32 seconds, the fastest was half a second.
3. All of the images associated with the Chat app take around 0.4 seconds each to load, though I’ve recorded some that took over 7 seconds and some that never even finished loading.

Now obviously all this happens concurrently, we’re not talking about adding up all these times. Nevertheless, an average page load of my homepage — a few thumbnails, a few notifications — took anywhere between 7 seconds and a whopping 32 seconds to render. That was between 75 and 111 separate server requests and an average of around 420Kb. Not cool.

This testing is completely unscientific and I’ve only done it around 10 times and taken averages, but it really does make me wonder if Facebook give two hoots about optimisation. I’ve been using it for about 8 months and was never impressed with its speed and it’s just become abominable with Chat. So I’m guessing they don’t care for speed too much.

Looking at the source code for a typical Facebook page isn’t any better. It’s a bloody mess and has the worst case of divitis I’ve seen for a long time. The HTML doesn’t validate, and if you turn off JavaScript, most of the clever stuff has no alternate fall-back mechanism, so basic functionality doesn’t even work at all — though to be fair, this is the main problem with web apps and doesn’t look like anyone will solve that any time soon.

I appreciate the Facebook has had phenomenal growth in a short space of time and that any rough development methods they used early on might now be difficult to change; however, they really need to do something about this as it’s becoming a serious problem.

As a conscientious web designer, it makes me both sad and angry to see a big player churning out such a dog’s breakfast of code. I take great pleasure in ensuring that what I build is optimised, fast to load, has no errors and adheres to modern web standards. Did the developers of Facebook somehow miss the Web Standards movement? Do they not care about the end-user experience?

If it stays like this, I’ll probably leave completely and go back to using phones and email to keep in touch with people — that was pretty much all I used it for anyway.

I’m not keen on rap music, but this video by The SEO Rapper is worth a view if you’re into standards-compliant web development:

I’ve been using the new Wordpress 2.5 on a project which I upgraded from 2.3.3. It seemed very swish, with some great new features: Media Management, multi-file uploading, Gravatars, tidier menus and — the big one — an improved Write screen. When Wordpress was in RC phase, this was said about the Write screen:

.”..only displays the information that you’ll use most often. It displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write.”

Wordpress’ Write screen is the core of the software. If this doesn’t work well, it doesn’t matter how many nice new features have been included, you’re gonna have a bad time blogging. So it was encouraging to read about it’s improvments. But rather than improving the experience, they made it worse. Why? In short: Bad use of screen real estate. (more…)

I was looking at The Wayback Machine recently — a fantastic resource that has been archiving websites for more than ten years. I was trying to find an old site I built that I never kept a copy of, but alas it was not there.

I was disappointed but began to think about the first site I built — it was in 1997 and was version two of Maxim Training’s website, the company I was working for at the time. I punched in the URL and lo and behold, there it was in all it’s framed glory:

http://web.archive.org/…/www.maxim.co.uk/

Looking at this with hindsight, my reaction was “What was I thinking?” I then went and gave myself a good slap.

Look at that lovely textured background! Look at the frames (two levels no less!). It has keyword spamming, a table based design, graphical text, crappy icons (I was sure they looked a lot better than that when I drew them) and a whole host of other things that are now firmly at the top of the list entitled “Big Fat No-Nos of Web Design”.

So what’s the point of highlighting this, other than some self-indulgent, self-berating nostalgia? Well, I think it shows that - despite the web still being an immature medium - we have come such a long way in such a short space of time.

Most of the things that are bad about that site are no longer being perpetuated by good web designers and developers. We’ve learnt so much:

• Sites that use frames stop search engines from indexing your content
• Graphical text is not search engine friendly and is inaccessible to some browsing devices
• Table-based layouts break usability and accessibility
• Keyword-spamming can get you de-listed from search engines
• People associate good design with good content — if your design sucks, no-one will read your content, however useful it might be. I think I’ve got a bit better at design since then!

Of course, we’re still learning. The web is maturing at a staggering rate. It’s becoming easier and quicker to develop new ideas, new ways of interacting with customers and new marketing opportunities. It’s exciting and it is hopefully only going to get better.

I’m looking forward to the day I can write an article about this site and say “What on earth was I thinking?” Well, almost.

I recently used Ticketweb to buy tickets to see Editors at the Brixton Academy in October. Reaching the last part of the ugly online ordering form, the user is presented with this. Spot the deliberate mistake:

The last part of the form asks you to select a privacy option. The method used is flawed yet it’s very common:

You’re being asked a binary choice question, where the answer is either yes or no. These types of questions should use a checkbox, not the two radio buttons that are presented here. Radio buttons are mutually exclusive and should only be used when selecting something from a list of options. And when using radio buttons, you need to ensure that one option is pre-selected using the attribute checked="checked", which has been omitted here.

It constantly amazes me that basic mistakes like this are still being made in modern web development. It’s probably just ignorance on the part of the developer and is easily solved through education. I was going to email them about it but can’t find anywhere on their site to do so…

Over the weekend I tried to become a member of the British Film Institute by applying online.

It was pretty painless to complete the online form until I got to the payment screen. I entered my Maestro card details and clicked ‘Submit’ but the form failed. I was told to check that I had entered the Card Issue Number correctly. There was nothing wrong with it, so I tried the process again in Internet Explorer 7 in case there was some specific bug happening in FireFox, my regular browser. The same thing happened in IE7.

Frustrated, I spotted the note at the bottom of the page saying to call their Membership Helpline any time up until 10pm. This was on Sunday afternoon, so I rang and unsurprisingly was put through to voicemail that stated opening hours were “Ten until six, Monday to Friday”.

Today, I received a call back stating that they were having problems with Switch/Maestro cards on the site and that I should complete the membership over the phone. I was impressed to receive a reply: often you never hear back when leaving voicemails on customer service lines.

So I called the box office who said that they might not be able to complete the membership as all their credit/debit card machines were having problems! Some luck. In the event, they took my details and my card did in fact go through so in a few days I will receive my membership and lots of free gubbins.

Three things stand out here:

1. The web is great unless it goes wrong over the weekend
2. Ensure your customer contact information is correct
3. A disgruntled customer can be retained and delighted with a courteous personal call

I’m a new fan of the BFI. What a shame then that I can’t get tickets for Withnail 20 years on, one of the reasons i joined.