Welcome to Uruguay. Please type “www.”
Six years ago I pointed out that some large websites in Uruguay required you to type “www” or they wouldn’t work. ANCAP, the national company for petroleum, alcohol, and Portland cement, still requires you to type “www” in late 2021. Honest: ancap.com.uy. [October 2024: still not corrected!]
However, Riogas, one of the cooking gas companies that has become completely annoying in the last few years by driving noise trucks around in a country where absolutely no one who might want to order gas lacks a phone, has outdone itself with web design.
It was probably 1994 when I first played around with web design, and knew about including “www redirects,” as one had to. But almost since then, web hosts have provided that automatically. But don’t tell Riogas. Honestly, check it out: riogas.com.uy. [October 2024 – corrected! Imagine that.]
But it gets better: do you remember GIFs? Not animated GIFs, but the limited-palette color file format released by Compuserve in 1987? Which you probably stopped using by the late 1990s when PNG came onto the scene?
Ah, but don’t tell Riogas. Not only do they use a GIF as one of their header images, but it’s a doozy: measuring 5,228 by 1,801 pixels, it takes up 8.8 megabytes!
There it is, in all its glory. Even if simply saved in an appropriate format (not GIF!), its size could easily be reduced by 80%.
However, I reduced that image to 1920 pixels wide and saved as jpeg at reasonable quality. It’s perfectly presentable and barely more than 1% of the size. In fact, would load 86X faster than their monster legacy image.
Maybe the genius designers at Riogas will figure that out one day?
