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Comment by nfm | Hacker News Reader

Is there a consulting market for fixing these kinds of examples? I quite enjoy optimizing these kinds of issues, but perhaps the value is too implicit or too low for them to bother.

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The issues these optimizations pose for the workflows of the whole team and the maintenance requirements are the blocker. You must be able to convince people that so much of their time are worth the gains (the same people that use high level languages and JS frameworks they may not need very much of for productivity boosts).

But for the slow sites highlighted, I don't understand why client-side performance and bandwidth usage apparently isn't a priority; I mean, their site, their front-end is their primary product, the thing they make money off of. A ten second load time is simply unacceptable; just look at the performance guys at Google, who have and are working hard to shave milliseconds off of page load time.

I'm probably going to offend a few people here, but creating a website without or with minimal performance optimization is just plain sloppy and uncraftmanshiplike work. Get your act together, or get a different job.

Right, and thanks for separating how to approach this issue in creation of an app vs maintenance. Real world issues like having a million images that are not compressed or sized correctly, or having part of an application out of your control that cannot be modernized or share assets with another part get in the way. There are companies that strive to outsource this work to a platform / appliance, like the recently acquired http://www.akamai.com/blaze instead of actually fixing/upgrading these issues (not to say that it works). After all, most companies don't have resources for their front-end devs to be profiling page loads by country and pushing HTTP performance under such dramatically different bandwidth/latency variations.

You have to think about the target demographic. The guys at The Verge are probably targeting those with faster computers, faster internet connections. Google is targeting everyone.

It sounds like the solution here, to respond to both lincolnbryant and nfm, is to find a way to highlight the benefit of a round of optimization but in an external fashion.

I, too, really enjoy performance optimization but that's an area that is especially hard to break into because many times the client wants something that just works. In my experience as a consultant it's rare that you get a client that cares about performance much unless it's a company like Apple that has a crazy amount of money to spend on making everything perfect (where 'perfect' isn't literal perfection but surely of a much higher caliber than the competition in many regards).

See my comment to the grandparent post. Just a 'skip to content' link at the top of the page and a way of accessing comments without javascript. People on text only clients are away then.

http://diveintoaccessibility.info/day_11_skipping_over_navig...

It's not like the Verge guys threw the page together themselves. They made a huge deal about working with Code and Theory who designed their web page. http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/1/2528367/welcome-to-the-ver... The fact that a respected professional web design company did this is scary.

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