So I get this reminder that the black background of my tie doesn’t exactly match the black slacks I’m wearing:

Either that, or the Web site has problems.

“When I am accessing a website that has Flash, I usually get a blank part of the screen, or a red box where the Flash element is,” Cunha says. “Or I may just get a static image.” If the organization behind that website hasn’t developed a scaled-down mobile-friendly alternative, Cunha says he usually avoids the site totally.

Back when I was at the interactive agency, we always tested to see the site without Flash and provided a different static image if the browser didn’t have Flash installed.

I’m sure that’s all done away with now, and most Web shops thought (if they thought at all) that Flash penetration was high enough to make that unnecessary.

And then, a couple years later, popular tablets and smartphones did not support Flash, and the lamentations begin.

Here’s a bit of advice, gratis: If you’re building or testing Web sites, always check to see what happens if dependent technologies aren’t there, and handle their absence gracefully. Sure, the technologies might have a lot of market penetration now, but what’s going to happen in a couple years?

Unless you’re a fan of clients clamoring for free fixes to their suddenly broken sites, just do it. You’ll make me quieter about it, anyway.

So, if you mean in numerical order, it would be seven, but wait a minute, seven is not a number in this question, it is a word representing a number, in which case 15 would be the first number in the series. BUT! in the list, 16 is the first number, and the list is missing the serial comma which might indicate that the and is equivalent to the + mathematical operator, which would make the second number 22. But what if it’s one number: 16,157? Then the first number is 1. But wait! If we’re counting ordinal numbers along with cardinal numbers, 1st is the first number that displays!

I tried entering seven.

I tried entering 16:

To hell with it. I reloaded the page and got a CAPTCHA that makes sense.

So what are the effects of CAPTCHAs on users, particularly in abandoned forms? Here’s one fellow’s thoughts.

Note how the top and bottom incrementers don’t match. Also, note the slide is not displaying.

Notice how the comments complain it doesn’t work. You would think that someone would fix it. But there’s budget for doing it, not doing it right.

Slide shows are a bit of a bugger to test because you have to test all the navigational devices, not just one set. And you have to make sure the right thing displays.

And then I get to this particular bit of logical Möbius strip:

To clarify: The control is labeled What did you accomplish on Dice.com today? (Select all that apply)

However, not one of the checkboxes is labeled None of these.

So to continue to the next step, if you want to continue, you must lie. And remember, the entrance to this quiz is on page load of Dice.com. That is, before you have accomplished anything at all.

Me, I didn’t lie: I eventually checked Other and Specified I got a blog post out of it.

What’s the lesson here, lads and lasses? Read the labels of the controls you’re checking, and make sure they make sense and make sure any enforcement rules upon them make sense vis-à-vis that label text.

What, not a missing resource? Not a null passed where a value is expected? This is particularly amateur work.

And it’s from a third party, again, fouling up the radio station’s Web site and doing who knows what. Brothers and sisters, I’ve had slightly more mature computers’ virtual memory swallowed up by these third party scripts running if I’ve left the Web site open overnight. Like it or not, this third party crap is a part of your Web site and its failures will reflect upon your company, not your ad server.

That one is classic. And ongoing on oh so many sites that try to use their insecure templates on their secured Web pages.

Mobile broadband caps might not be putting the hurt on most mobile subscribers yet, but data usage is going to keep creeping up. And that’s without people doing any more actual browsing.

The HTTP Archive charted the growth of the average web page and found that average web pages have grown from 726 KB a year ago to 965 KB now. The 33 percent jump is due in large part to more images and third-party scripts like ads and analytics. Javascript content, spurred on by the rise of HTML5, has grown over the last year by 44.7 percent, according to analysis by Royal Pingdom.

I remember when 1Mb hard drives cost $1000, you damn kids. Before you were born.

But it does clarify an interesting point: The time your Web page takes to load isn’t the only metric you should check when you’re performance testing your mobile applications or even your regular Web site if you expect mobile users will access it.

Although your leadership might say, That’s okay, we’re not designing for mobile users, if your bloated Web site is chewing up their allocated bandwidth, they’re going to find someone more streamlined.

(Link via Tweet retweeted by Fred Beringer.)

In about an hour, I’ll be participating in the crowd-sourced load testing of http://Packers.com http://bit.ly/ucICSO Good luck, everyone.

A couple of near-timeouts later and some really, really long load times, and I’m the proud owner of one share of Green Bay Packers stock. It’s fewer shares than I own of the startup where I used to work, but they’re worth about the same.

At any rate, two hours after I tweeted, the first news reports about the slow Web response time appeared:

On Twitter, fans were reporting that the it was difficult to access the website – www.packersowner.com – or the toll-free line: 855-8-GOPACK.

Murphy and other team officials said they anticipated there would be high demand. “Have patience,” Murphy told reporters at a news conference Tuesday morning. “Be patient.”

Who could have expected that this would have occurred? Anyone with dramatic Web launch experience.

UPDATE: More on that great tsunami here:

Sarah Johnson, 34, of Portage said it took her nearly 20 minutes to complete what should have been a 30-second process, but it was worth to wait.

…

The team received 1,600 orders in the first 11 minutes of the sale, said Packers president Mark Murphy, who had to reassure fans the Packers website was still working. Team spokesman Aaron Popkey said he did not have any sales data as of early Tuesday afternoon.

“It’s just a question of volume,” Murphy said. “Fans are excited about this opportunity. We just encourage fans to be patient.”

150 orders a minute. What, were they running it in development?

To keep something like this from going where it will scare the innocent users:

As you can see, all the appearances of li have changed to p. Forensically speaking, we can ascertain that someone changed this from a bulleted list and used search-and-replace to do it.

Never, never, ever, do a blind search-and-replace on your text. And have someone else look at it before it’s scattered across the Internet.