How Much Is Enough?

This will probably seem like a mini-rant, but I hope there’s some useful and valid information (lessons) included as well.

You see, I just left one of the more popular blogs, known for it’s coverage of web and social media tech, and am really peeved at the way I was treated there.

No, I don’t mean anybody was directly mean or rude, and I wasn’t involved in a comments flame war of any kind… what I’m talking about is how the webmaster and managing staff who oversee site content neglected to take me, the visitor, into account when they planned their content, scripts and advertising.

Here’s what I’m talking about. I landed on a blog posting there from a link in my Twitter stream, though I am a regular visitor to the blog anyway and even have an account there.

Well, the blog page took nearly 3 minutes to completely load despite my broadband connection. This always frustrates me, and it isn’t just advertising that causes it, but an overload of social widgets, analytics and other javascripts all help to slow many web sites way down–though the advertising is often the worst of the bunch with bloated code and media files.

So anyway, this page that took 3 minutes to finish loading for me held an interesting story, so I slowly scrolled through it. And I’m glad that I did, because even better than the story were about 4 dozen comments that went even deeper into the topic.

One comment specifically was beyond interesting for me, it actually helped me to understand something that had been bugging me for weeks recently.

This is one of the bigger reasons why I love blogs that have a strong community base, the exchange of information and ideas is a true value for all.

Anyway, so I noticed that there was a nice little  link beneath each comment that said “Like” – “Report” and I thought “well heck, I really liked this comment because it was so helpful to me”,  then I clicked the link to let the comment poster know he was appreciated and…

I was prompted to login or create an account with Disqus before I would be allowed to like a comment on the blog.

Hmm, but I was already logged in on the blog where the story was posted, because I have an account there, on the blog, where I want to like the comment… but I need another account with a 3rd party service in order to like a comment on a blog where I currently am and already have an account…

Yeah, it’s that freakin convoluded.

All of this sent me into a minor melt-down, especially after having to wait so long for the page to load, so I decided to waste a little more time and see just how much garbage that page was loading to cause the 3 minute load time over broadband.

This isn’t perfectly accurate because there are some scripts which aren’t accessable in their entirety, but of the files, widgets, scripts and media I was able to grab it came to a whopping 612kb!

Really, do we need so many widgets, scripts and graphics on a blog page that when added to the advertising it creates a software sized experience?

I like the little doo-dads and me-hickeys too, one look at my blog design confirms that, but there has to be a limit to how much crapola is shoved onto a site. Especially if the site is serving media-based advertising.

At some point it all stops enhancing the user’s experience and begins hampering it. That’s why the Google and Facebook connect social features were removed from this blog a while back. They’re great features, but due to size and often unpredictable (unreliable) connection speeds they caused more than a few visitors to leave me negative feedback–and at the end of the day if something isn’t good for my visitors then it isn’t good for my site.

So, when you’re designing your web site(s), or sitting in on the conversation over what gizmos to add to your site content, keep in mind that sometimes less really is more.

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