Ving.se being Sweden’s best web site? I think not
What’s in an award, really? Swedish computer magazine Internetworld has just given the Sweden’s Best Web Site 2007 award to the supposedly best web site in Sweden.
Their pick fell on the travel web site Ving.se, a charter travel web site. Interested in if Ving has shaped up since the last time I saw it, a long time ago, I decided to give it a little test drive.
Technical breakdown
You go to the start page, and immediately you’re met by 259 validation errors, and 12 validation warnings. Mind you, this is with a transitional doctype, which is very forgiving. Pick your doctype and validate, maybe?
Let’s try and resize the text. Ooops, nothing adapts to the text size and you soon have a text overflow resulting in a web site which is completely illegible. Good thinking, nice poster you have designed. Oh, wait, it’s supposed to be a web site!
Semantics: Nice, using an unordered list for the top navigation menu. Maybe there’s some hope here! Hmm, I see a H2, but where’s the H1? And H3-H6 for that matter? Wait, hang on, is that only tables used for layout? Mixed upper- and lowercase tags, literally riddled with inline CSS and JavaScript? Et cetera.
JavaScript turned off: Let’s try that booking helper in the smack middle of the start page. But, it’s completely empty? Where did all cities and destinations go? Oh, I have to have JavaScript for that? Jeez…
Document size: 905 KB. Wow. Really. It takes some effort to fill one single web page with that much content. Content size breakdown:
- HTML document
- 117 KB
- Images
- 529 KB
- Scripts
- 206 KB (mind you, these are minified)
- CSS files
- 54 KB
Google has decided to rank it with a staggering PageRank of 2. This translates to worthless content which isn’t very reliable.
The award motivation
Basically, the jury find that Ving gives you such a desire to travel, and that its Flash eye candy is outstanding. It says that Ving.se is indeed Sweden’s best web site, “all categories”.
Are you for real? Are you fucking kidding me? I can understand that they like things that look pretty (what’s pretty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s a completely different story), and give them that satellite pictures and travel stories are god things. But really, to completely disregard any technical or usability aspect and at the same time stating that it’s is the best, all categories, sounds to me like the jury is incompetent.
Congratulations to Ving, though. Good on you. Maybe next time you will use actual web developers to put the web site together?
If Ving.se is Sweden’s best web site, I think I should emigrate…
