Slow, ugly and useless

No, not [INSERT PLAYER NAME HERE] but the new Forest official website!

As if it wasn’t bad enough for the Forest PR team that Fawaz Al-Hasawi breaks all the news on Twitter before they get a chance, they now have to contend with the fact that their website is so sluggish the Nottingham Topper will probably be beating them to exclusives now.

LTLF’s chief computer geek tested the new NFFC homepage on the extremely geeky Web Page Test where it took a staggering 21.48 seconds to fully load (compared to a speedy 2.83s from LTLF), meaning for the average user the experience is like going back in time to dial-up internet.

It’s not even as if it has a million adverts to load like the last layout (the one improvement) – in fact there seems to be mostly large patches of white space, like a trendy magazine only with duller fonts. Perhaps all that loading time is devoted to the confusing, over-bearing and difficult-to-use navigation menu.

Add to that the fact that none of it works on a mobile phone browser (in fact as this article has been written the whole thing has crashed at least once) and generally you’ve got a bit of a disaster of a website.

You may be thinking ‘pot calling kettle’ reading this, or more likely ‘who cares?’ The new Forest website being a pig isn’t really the most pressing issue on the cards at the moment and, in the club’s defence, the website (along with most other club sites outside the Premiership) has been created by FL Interactive Limited, the Football League’s media subsidiary, so really it’s out of their hands.

Still, it’s a shame to think of the good money (and no doubt someone is laughing as they take their sizeable fee to the bank) that has been chucked away on this awful revamp and a grim prospect for the LTLF news desk that we’re going to have to use the new site almost every day for the next however many years! Mind you, it might take that long for the next news story to load…