Omar Abdel-Wahab

Being the football fan that I am, following like 7 football championship, it's very important to have some website where I can read follow-ups, watch summaries and goals, read few articles, etc. So I am a big fan. I was trying to find a decent football website in the Arab area, since I need to read more about our local championships. This lead me to daily visit some ugly websites made with stupid templates and full of flash banners. Among all the ugly websites in the world, I have never seen anything uglier that http://filgoal.com. I have never seen anything that's worse. It's not just ugly, it's also one of the most unusable site I have ever visited. Firefox memory usage jumps ~40MBs as soon as I visit this website regardless of the OS. Let's analyze the front page quickly and thoroughly: 1. The page contains at least 12 banners, 10 of them are flash banners, at least five have animations which means more CPU usage and more RAM. The main content has a flash banner topping most of the news headlines! The page also has a ticker. 2. There's a background sound that's very loud and at some point in time they didn't allow visitors to run off that sound. 3. Of course the site doesn't validate as an HTML document. 4. The page includes Google Analytics code 5 times!! 5. The page opens about 90 connections to the server!! 6. The page takes at least 30 seconds to load from cache and 4 minutes to load if cache is deleted! Note: I measured this on a 1Mb connection that's dedicated to a single machine. 7. Due to the too much flash, Firefox starts leaking memory due to bugs in Linux Flash player. On Windows, it makes the browser slower. 8. The main headlines are in a JavaScript pager that has an animation that takes like 10 seconds to finish. 9. The page header is about 400 pixles! Yes, 400 pixles, that's half my 1280x800 resolution. I have to scroll to be able to see the upper half of the content. 10. The page footer is 700 pixels! 11. Total background images used in the page is about 5MBs. 12. The page is supposedly a 3 column page, but on its top third, the left side bar is wider than the right then in the middle third both are the same width and the middle area has two columns and final third has the middle area as three columns and the right side bar has a banner that's half its size. I could have continued to write some more but I think I've had enough.