Well, if you’re going to plunk down a cool million dollars to have your website redesigned, you might as well make sure you make it ugly, and slow. Apparently, that had to be the goal of the Morrison Foerster (AKA MoFo) website redesign.

I actually spotted this a few weeks ago and sent it around to some friends of mine for their feedback.  The usual comments were “Good Lord!! What were they thinking???” and “Oh my… as soon as I got on it, I couldn’t wait to get out!” But the universal comment was “God, it is so slow!!”

Never mind the fact that it looks like whoever they paid to design the website appeared to be “print media experts” and not web designers, this site loads like it is running on an old 486 processor.  Why on earth would a site that is basically two colors, run so slow??

I went to IWebTool.com to see if it was really as slow as I thought by comparing it to some other law firm websites.  Sure enough, it was.  On average it took over 1.5 seconds to load the initial webpage.  Click on some of the links and it sometimes took 3 seconds to load.  When I compared it to Skadden’s website, or DLA Piper, the MoFo site was significantly slower.  Skadden’s and DLA Piper loaded 1kb of data in .05 seconds or less compared to MoFo’s site taking 1.26 seconds.  That’s means it takes MoFo 25 times longer to load the page!!

MoFo may want to go back to the drawing board on this one.  Maybe they have a money-back guarantee from whoever convinced them to go with this design.