What's wrong with C|Net?

C|Net (http://www.cnet.com/). It used to be one of my favorites sites for things technological and computorial. Alas, not no mo'.

The last few times I've been there, it's been a horrid mess of broken image links. The site is drain-bamaged without its images. Everything I know about web design says that your site should be usable without images. The reasons are three-fold:

1. Accessibility. Not everyone who uses computers is sighted. Fact of life. A well-designed site takes this into account. And C|Net is big. Very big. Millions of visitors hit that site every year. Statistically, some of them have to be vision-impaired (or maybe they gave up and don't go there anymore).
   
   After looking at the site without images, trying to use ALT tags and TITLE tags to ferret out what the broken image links point to, I've reached a conclusion: cnet.com is, at best rude in this respect. At worst, they're downright disrespectful. I feel for anyone who visits that site who's vision impaired.
   
   Get a social conscience, C|Net. Fix your site. (like my site is the paragon of accessibility. "Let he who is without sin...")



2. Performance. In this day of ever-expanding broadband use, through cable modems, DSL and other options, this is less a problem than it used to be. "Back in the day," when Mosaic ruled the web, people actually turned off images in their browsers to make pages load faster. It was not uncommon, way, way back in the Internet Dark Ages of the mid-90's, to turn off images in your browser. It made for an Improved User Experience Lordy! It took me forever to find a short, lucid description of "User Experience." What does that say about an industry (User Experience Design) that claims to know about enhancing the user experience that can't even clearly define its own business....?
   
   At that time, even though HTML 1.0 didn't have much in the way of gold-plating to bloat up pages like it does now, the 'Net's pipes were all tiny and loading a bunch of images could take some time. Especially when we surfed from home; those pipes were downright miniscule by today's standards. Remember 4800 and 9600 Kb modems?.
   
   Many people still use dial-up (like my Mom, who refuses to move to DSL or Cable modem -- fodder for another rant), but I don't think anyone turns off images anymore. Now they just grouse about how slow the web is (ah-hem... Mom!).
   
   Back In The Day, pages had to be designed for use with images turned off. Obviously, the web designers at cnet.com forgot about this little design guideline.



3. usability. This is actually Reason Numero Uno, at least from the perspective of someone running a website who wants to stay in business. Actually, both reasons 1 and 2 are specific instances of usability. When C|Net's images go away, usability of this site plummets. It's downright sucky, actually. I'll go someplace else before trying to make sense of that mess. Someplace like PC Magazine's site.

So, here' s what you get when you browse C|Net with FireFox, Opera and Internet Explorer (note that these images have been optimized for the web [i.e., lower resolution, etc.] to make them download faster, so the text is a bit smudged):

FireFox




Opera



Internet Explorer (Sorry, no link to IE at Microsoft. I can't actively support IE anymore. FireFox rocks. IE sucks. )



Now, at first I thought it might be FireFox. However you can plainly see that C|Net is an equal opportunity offender.

Now, I suspect the reason this is happening is that the images are downloading from a 3rd-party image server and my browser or firewall software is blocking them. For instance, the big image in the upper left cornet, which I think is their logo, comes from this location: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/hd/fd-redball.gif.

I tried to include an image of this link, but it won't work. At all. The site isn't responding. What's that about? In the first pass over this entry, I'd written some speculations about my browser or my firewall software interfering with the images. I expanded on the paragraph above. However, it appears that the site just flat don't work. Or maybe it does, and there's something going on at my end to prevent it from working.... Whatever. Don't know. Don't care.

Whatever the reason for the broken links, I refuse to go past that home page. I tried it once. Yikes! Give it a shot. Click on any of the links on the home page. Like, say, the Cell Phones link in the left column of links. What a nightmare.

So, C|Net, if you're listening: fix your site. Because I'm not going to stop by to see you until you do.

Anyone else who does web page design take note: this is exactly how visitor to your site react when your site is broken. They go elsewhere. A word to the wise.... (also here and here, though the latter [Bartlett's] attributes Cervantes.)