Bruce Giovando

A few months ago I did a website for an English manners school in Taiwan. The businesses needs were straight forward – a brochure website with a bit of dynamic content. Nothing a few static pages and some google services couldn’t handle. Unfortunately there were some snags during the development process. I won’t go into detail but it came down to communication and the client not supplying me with the necessary information. I was eventually able to finish the site but my “unprofessionalism and unresponsiveness” led the client to hire a new web developer before I had even finished.

I was glad to be done with the project and pretty interested to see how the new developer would improve upon my work. I’ve been checking the URL periodically for the past few months and until today it’s been a web server splash screen – he must have really hated my work to consider it a better alternative.

The new website by kayo-web is actually just a free template with a few tweaked CSS values and some images and content plugged in. Funnily enough it’s being used for the web firms site as well. I checked the license – Creative Commons 2.5 – so it’s okay for commercial use… but the web developer has removed the original copyright notice and attribution, breaking the license and copyright law in the process.

Scroll over my version of the site below to see the new ‘updated’ design.

Beyond the circa 1993 aesthetic the main page is a whopping 2.476MB and took 23 seconds to load on my 15Mbps connection. To give a little perspective my version of the entire website (all pages, images and javascript) rang in at 606kb (0.59MB) or just under a 1/4 the size of the redesigned home page. So why is the new version so large? There’s a photorealistic banner slideshow saved as a gif weighing in at 2.4MB. That’s larger than most flash sites. Not knowing when to use JPGs over GIFs and vice versa only leads me to believe that this web firm is a joke – an image map being used as the main menu on the contact page only seems to confirm my suspicion.

I kind of regret not doing what the new web firm did: using a free template with about an hours work. But as much as I like getting money for nothing, I take a pride in my work and I’ll be damned if I ever sell a free template to exploit a client for a quick buck.

I should note that my version of the site was standards compliant xhtml and css. The performance comparison was done as objectively as possible. Browser caches were turned off and because server optimization is part of the job I tested the sites in the most real world environment possible.