So as many of you may know, I visit certain trusted (based on the fact that they are constant in news for a very long time and their layouts are such that I can tolerate) online paper websites for my daily news.  Daily independent is one of them.  Yesterday, I did my thing and noticed that the "webmasters" didn't bother to do a simple sanity (regression) test on the live URL box after updating the news, resulting in the site being down due to a parser error.  Usually when this happens, I give them a 2nd and depending on how good they have been over the years, a third try.  After that, "see you later (that is how i stopped visiting punch's website, after 3 years as they are forcing subscriptions on certain news items)".

Today the site is back up and as i was doing my thing, I noticed something rather odd - horizontal scroll.  Again, I am not a coding saint (granted again, I would have done some sanity testing before launch) but there are things which are inexcusable.  Anyways, my eye caught the "half ad" to the right and that is the "raison d'etre" of this post:

If I were an advertiser (I assume they at least visit sites their ads are featured on and take the kind of notes I am setting forth here. If not, God help us all), I would be foaming at the mouth right now, considering I most likely spent a ton of bucks to feature my ad on the site.  How do potential customers get to potentially see my ad?  Even if it is a google ad that they own, how do they again, get potential clicks, if people can't even see the ad or half of it, at that?  Please see attached image.

To whom it may concern:
Fix the problem ASAP.  I have no personal interest in the site but want to see us, as web developers, grow as an industry.  If and when that web conference holds, again, rather than focus on building the next facebook clone, the basics of our trade need to be focused on first.  It seems in an attempt to be the next larry page, sergey brin, bill gates and zuckerberg combined, we forget the little, inexcusable stuff.

Okay, I am off my soap box now