Why are some people who can code so bad at websites?

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Dale_tem

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Dale
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My sailing clubs website...

www.burghfieldsailing.org

It looks so bad, the 90s are going to send the heavies round if they don't get their website design back. It is so slow it is unbearable. Yet looking through the website, he has done some pretty cool bits which aren't simple and require a lot of coding knowledge.

6 hours building a replacement, it is only a start. I only have a low res copy of the current logo, so can't do much with it. Will enlarge the logo more tomorrow and move it above the menu. Feedback on layout etc. please. All content is straight from old site, so links in article will take you to old site.

burghfield.bsquared.co.uk

EDIT :- After viewing on my iPad, it is only slow in Chrome, it is almost dial up speed in chrome, yet almost instant in Safari. Some bad code in there somewhere
 
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On my dongle (approx 2Mb/sec) it loads in about 10-15 secs so not bad but attempting to validate it on W3.org showed 137 errors and 37 warnings (!) so coding really bad.

This is probably giving a lot of the problems.
 
Simple reason 90% of programmers have no creative talent, and less than 30% are competent programmers to begin with :)
 
There is a big difference between coding and designing. Coding is making things behind the scene happen, design is what the site will look like.

I could code you a fantastic website, but my design skills are s***e so it probably wouldn't look great.

No different than a mechanic probably couldn't design a car and neither could a car designer fix an engine.
 
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As with 95% of websites out there (including your version I guess) it runs on some form of front end coded in php and a back end on a database server with the code written by a community of some sort (the original appears to be a project of the Appalachian State Uni - banjos at hand anyone :D). I suspect the slowness is due to database speed/connection issues on a shared server. Design - well as ecoleman has said, there's a huge difference between design and coding. I can't design a website for toffee, I like to think I'm an OK coder though :)
 
Dale_tem said:
It is so slow it is unbearable.
Click to expand...
Basic problem is that while the TCP/IP negotiation is near instant on port 80 on the server (indicating apache or whatever is awake and listening), once a

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.burghfieldsaling.org

request is sent in there is about 15 seconds of nothing before a response is spewed back.

Bad design won't cause that amount of latency on a single HTTP GET request. Bad server configuration or too much load might - lots of websites store contents in a database, that doesn't make it slow on its own.


Your alternative version has really distracting slidy images, so I would get no further than the homepage before closing it. No-one should take design advice from me though.
 
:coat:
 
Slow for me, about 20s. Looks like there are functions in the CMS driving it which are quite sucky, and also has tables (slow to render) and inline CSS (inefficient).
 
Monumentally slow. Done with a php based cms system by the looks of it. Just whack something together with wordpress...

I'm sure I've tried that cms before and it wasn't that bad. http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/ worth trying a design refresh. URLs aren't very friendly either in the menu system.
 
Yes. In addition to what others said, it is a mistake to give a computer techie a designers job in the first place. Only a few are cross-talented.

Dale if you need a vector version of the logo, let me know and I can create one for you. Then you can scale it to any size.
 
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Good grief.. I can code.. markup langueges... scripts languages and full on progrmaming.. everyhting from html to Perl for the internet... Other stuff like C for non internet... I couldnt design a website to save my life..

I know 15 languages from markup to programming.. all require syntax perfect code.... Yet I still cant manage my own native english language proper :(
 
To be fair, there's not a lot wrong with the design apart from looking a bit dated, scales fine which is better than most amateur efforts! The state that back end code must be in to run that slowly demonstrates a fundamental lack of ability when it comes to the technical side, rather than design.
 
Yes, I've seen worse. I call them "My kitten" websites and they use background patterns.
 
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