ShoeMoney manages to highlight the failure of Wordpress

Without wanting to get on my web-developer-accessibility-high-horse again (such as I did when denouncing the AWeber Lightbox as evil), I visited ShoeMoney for the first time in a couple of months today and it started my on a journey highlighting where Wordpress actually fails.

What started this minor investigation was seeing this when visiting his site:



This is a very common problem when implementing Lightbox-style overlays
Flash content takes itself out of the flow of the document and will sit above your overlay (seemingly with a huge Z-Index that you'll never beat).  The trick is to un-embed the video when the overlay is triggered and re-embed it when the overlay is removed.  In order to keep things looking good you can replace the video with an image of the video if you must, or just a placeholder; either way to avoid this problem you need to remove the Flash out of the DOM (document object model).  Clearly this is something that Jeremy's Wordpress Lightbox plugin didn't take into account.

So I dove into the source code to see if it was Aweber again
Good lord.  9 linked stylesheets, some stylres embedded into the head, multiple inclusions of Jquery (a Javascript framework) and generally included files everywhere.  More in-page Javascript is found at the foot of the homepage too, underneath a form that has been positioned using tables and various objects with inline styles.  No. No. No.

This isn't Jeremy's fault; you're either a web developer or you're not and Wordpress is there to empower the average user
It just hurts me to see such a violent mish-mash of widgets and incorrect code.  I can only imagine how those chaps at Unique Blog Designs feel about this.

Why does it matter?
The most obvious and costly point will be the weight of each page.  If you're including the same Javascript framework file onto each page twice, that's probably 50kb of wasted bandwidth for every page impression.  If you're on the wrong hosting package and you get Dugg, that might really hurt your pocket.  Heavy pages load slower (obviously Jeremy has decent hosting, but you probably have quite ordinary hosts that don't cost too much, so there'll be a noticable drag effect on your pages).  Using this many Wordpress plugins in such an ad-hoc manner makes your code ugly and invalid.

Since when did invalid code make a difference to my blog?
While I don't believe in every website passing the W3C validator, it does serve to be a fair metric as to how easily your site can be parsed by search engine spiders.  Valid code is inherantly more accessible, easier for alternative browsers to interpret and therefore easier for search engine spiders to find all your content.  Malformed code can have detrimental effects to your natural search listings and that's not ideal.

How can I avoid being in this situation?
Realistically you'll want a blog design implemented with all of your plugins in mind; therefore the developer can optimise what files are included onto the page and tackle most of these problems before they even begin.  The problem occurs when you've got a perfectly good design that has been overloaded with widgets and plugins, all adding weight to the page and making your blog slow and unattractive.

So please Jeremy, give Unique Blog Designs a call and see if they can't optimise the design they did for you; it's organically progressed into a bit of a mess...

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