Media websites are a bad way to judge the state of web app development (which sucks for its own reasons). If you manage to hire good developers on a media site, they will try to optimize how ads and the endless list of third party libraries are pulled in.
If you didn’t get some dope developers then they will just half ass dump all of the stuff needed onto the page (which is why most of the the web sucks).
What’s worse is that these sites sit under a publishing/media business, so they aren’t tech companies (the devs are second class citizens).
Everyday I run into at least one site where they couldn’t figure out a sticky header, or a decent ‘accept-cookies’ box (where it takes up half the screen, and when you hit X (if you find it), it stutters away, as if css transitions is a mind blowing concept).
Then after that, the page janks down as a whole ad gets rendered. Zero effort is being put in at some of these places. I would consider lazy loading content in the visible viewport the moon for these sites.
This is a necessary discussion because the web is becoming a tech slum with these poorly designed websites. To bring it back to the larger web development (both app and website), it can be difficult to suggest to a team a very simple question - ‘Do you not see that the end result looks and feels like shit?’. It’s too abrasive, but all of us need to start asking these basic question for quality’s sake.
Media are on shoestring budgets, unlikely to sustain good developers. But it's not only media, many other services neglect the user-centric optimization. That case is probably due to proliferation of various kinds of outsourcing/seo consultants whose interests don't overlap much with users'.
If you didn’t get some dope developers then they will just half ass dump all of the stuff needed onto the page (which is why most of the the web sucks).
What’s worse is that these sites sit under a publishing/media business, so they aren’t tech companies (the devs are second class citizens).
Everyday I run into at least one site where they couldn’t figure out a sticky header, or a decent ‘accept-cookies’ box (where it takes up half the screen, and when you hit X (if you find it), it stutters away, as if css transitions is a mind blowing concept).
Then after that, the page janks down as a whole ad gets rendered. Zero effort is being put in at some of these places. I would consider lazy loading content in the visible viewport the moon for these sites.
This is a necessary discussion because the web is becoming a tech slum with these poorly designed websites. To bring it back to the larger web development (both app and website), it can be difficult to suggest to a team a very simple question - ‘Do you not see that the end result looks and feels like shit?’. It’s too abrasive, but all of us need to start asking these basic question for quality’s sake.