This article is part of the Sorry State of the Web series, which aims to raise awareness about common and fundamental issues in supposedly professional websites in order to push web developers and designers to raise the bar and deliver at least decent user experience. Since a lot of issues were noted in April 2017, the April issue will be split into two parts. I would like to thank those readers of Gigi Labs who contributed several of the entries in this article.

JobsPlus Receives e-Business Award

In the March 2017 issue of the Sorry State of the Web series, I had pointed out some really basic flaws in the JobsPlus website. That didn’t keep it from receiving an award for “best technology in the e-Government sector”.

Image credit: taken from here

Facebook’s Intrusive Login Prompt

If you view a video on Facebook and you aren’t logged in, you get this login prompt that practically takes up the entire window:

There’s a tiny “Not Now” link at the bottom that you can click. This doesn’t actually remove the prompt, but makes it smaller and moves it to the bottom:

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to close it, and it still takes up a significant portion of the screen, especially if you are on a laptop. Not very nice!

Don’t Send Passwords via Email

I got this email from a web hosting company:

They never learn. You should never send passwords via email. There is absolutely no guarantee that emails are transmitted via secure channels, so you should assume that it is insecure by default. Instead, let the user choose a password on your website, when the content is served over HTTPS.

Links Should Actually Work

We all know how annoying broken links are, but RightBrain have found a way to match that frustration using links that actually work:

The social media icons at the bottom-right actually point to the website’s homepage, rather than to the social media portrayed by the icons.

It’s not enough that links aren’t broken. Make sure they actually go to the right place!

Microsoft .NET Core Documentation

If you want to learn a little C#‎ (whatever that is supposed to mean), you’re in luck. Microsoft has some tutorials about it:

Seriously though, the .NET Core documentation had some funny HTML entities running around in its sidebar, as you can see above. Very careless, but it looks like they’ve noticed, because this has now been fixed.

Another area where .NET Core documentation is still lacking is in printer-friendliness:

I have written in the past how making webpages printer-friendly is really easy yet very often overlooked. In fact, in the example above, you get around 10 pages of printed content, and the rest of 67 pages which are blank. I have raised this with Microsoft. It seems to be fixed in some browsers (e.g. Edge), and mitigated in Chrome. It’s no longer 67 pages, but at the time of writing this article, you still get quite a few blanks.

Finally, I noticed an issue with their HTTPS. As you can see, you don’t get the padlock indicating that the connection is properly encrypted:

Apparently it’s due to mixed content:

This only happened to me using Firefox on Linux though.

Dear Steve

High up on the list of biggest fails ever in this series is the MySmile dental clinic. There is this contact page with instructions from the dental clinic to a certain “Steve” (presumably from Just Some Coding Ltd, who developed the website) on improvements to make:

Although some pages and links seem to have been renamed, the old “Contact” page shown above is still online!

In any case, Steve didn’t really give a shit, because the map point that he was asked to change still points to the exact same place.

Language Confusion

Unlike JobsPlus, DR Gaming Technology‘s website is really multilingual. In fact, it supports so many languages that one of the language flags actually ended up sitting over the search box:

Despite the language selection, The Latest News box to the right includes many languages at the same time, including English, German and Spanish:

Timely CORS Issue

A friend noted that one of the fonts (Times New Roman) used on the login form of Timely (a web app that I love to hate) looked very out of place.

In fact, the developers never intended to use Times New Roman. They wanted a font called Avenir, but the browser defaulted to Times New Roman due to a CORS issue:

Timely fixed this issue within hours, but it wasn’t timely enough to keep me from taking screenshots.

Use Thumbnails

On some articles at Forbes, the images take ages to load. For instance:

What is more depressing than the job ads mentioned in the article? The fact that the image embedded in that page is actually a really large image:

It should be common knowledge now, in 2017, that you should embed a small version of the image (a thumbnail), and link to a larger version. This way, the image won’t impact page loading time, but the people who want to see the detail can opt to do so. This is especially important in galleries with lots of images.

To Be Continued…

More to follow in Part 2.