My own website was in dire need of an upgrade, so I designed and built a new site in Wordpress that is both a portfolio and a blog.

This site was designed as a portfolio to showcase Gaijin’s film production and sound recording services. It was designed in Photoshop and delivered using Wordpress.

The Royal Marsden Manual of Clinical Nursing Procedures system provides online access for government sector public-health professionals, as well as facilities for administrators to update their access with their own procedural guidelines.

I was asked by the online publishing company Semantico to develop the look and feel of the Manual, as well as creating AA standard accessible HTML/CSS templates.

A complete design and build of a new site for this West London based plumber. Designed in Photoshop and hand-coded XHTML, CSS and some PHP.

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.

Many thanks to Gabby Wilson of Seachange Events for her lovely comment about my work:

Matt gave me lots of advice about how to improve the practical functionality of my website which I feel has really improved the end result. He is able to communicate in a non-technical way, is friendly, professional and helpful and ultimately I am delighted with the end result.

Gabby Wilson, Sea Change Events

Thanks to Harvey Morgan of HSM for a new testimonial. His was a fun little site to work on and has received a lot of positive feedback from his customers.

Matt’s creation for our site was exactly what our company wanted, it has added 30% new business and captured our company personality perfectly for which we are very grateful.

Harvey Morgan, HSM Plumbers

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:

Just had to post a link to this fabulous web portfolio by Bryan Katzel. It has one of the most interesting and innovative uses of semi transparent PNGs I’ve ever seen. Simply scroll down to the bottom and keep an eye on the central area of the page with the rainbow. Gorgeous!

http://www.webleeddesign.com/

Note: Don’t even think about visiting if you use Internet Exploder 6 or lower.

Web 2.0 is not a design aesthetic. Yet that hasn’t stopped thousands of designers perpetuating a commonly understood “Web 2.0″ look: over used shiny reflections, rounded corners, subtle gradients, bold colours and the use of the word ‘Beta’ next to your logo (whether or not your service is actually in beta!)

However, I find the most annoying effect is the now ubiquitous ‘peeling sticker’. It’s everywhere, and not just on the web either. I confess I just don’t get it: what’s wrong with those stickers? Do they use cheap glue?

If you need to bring attention to something on your page, then be original about it. Don’t just follow the crowd. And think about your page structure — good information architecture should lead users to the pertinent areas of your page, and you can do this without having to resort to cheap tricks.

Still, if you really want to perpetuate this aesthetic, you don’t even need to do the work yourself. Just get an app to do it for you. *Sigh*.