Detik
Detik is a popular Indonesian news site, and I just heard from Lala that someone created a copy of detik news by fetching the news material of detik every 5 minutes. The reason why he created the project was because he thought it would be cool if people could read detik news without having to look at those ugly ads on detik’s site.
What he did was wrong, he was breaking the copyright and I do not think it is a creative idea. However, I do think the design of detik is ugly. If you visit the website, you will see that the page is crowded with banner advertisement.
Placing banner ads are fine, I know that’s where detik get their money, but placing banner advertisement on the top, left, right and bottom side of the page is annoying. Not only those banner ads are annoying but visitors are required to spend more time and bandwidth to load the banner ads.
Detik is not the only Indonesian site with so many banner ads on the site. Kompas, one of Indonesia’s most popular newspaper, also placed a lot of annoying banner ads everywhere on the page.
Look at CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Time, and many other international news sites. They do have banner ads, but not everywhere!
Accessing detik is horribly slow. I know this is probably a bandwidth issue, but I think they could improve the speed of their site by following the webstandards. If you take a look at their markup, you can see a lot of presentational markup that could be replaced with the use of CSS.
Not only detik will save bandwidth by following the webstandards but visitors of detik will also benefit because they will be able to load detik.com faster than before.
There should be a webstandards campaign with the goal of introducing the benefit of designing with webstandards in Indonesia. If detik provide a cleaner, faster and less banner ads, hopefully there won’t be anyone in the world who will think about stealing their content again.
1. iamal 14 Jan 2004
And their table- and frame-based layout… uf… even I use text-based browser (that means no picture and applet), my browser must deal with difficulties in table-constructing and I have to be patient navigating through frame.
2. ephi 15 Jan 2004
about this campaign, why don’t we start one? :) I used lynx when our campus connection is very slow and indeed it’s frustrating to see those ugly tables and un-alt-ed pictures. but some of my friends use links ^^;
3. William Pramana 15 Jan 2004
Sure, maybe we should contact each other to discuss/plan things ;)