The same front page, on the same phone
Every figure on this page was recorded in a real browser on August 11, 2026, loading aero-news.net at a 390px viewport — an iPhone-class screen, and the most common phone width on the web today.
wide on a 390px phone
jQuery 1.4.2 release year
dead scripts loading
social sharing tags
One screenshot, one live page
The panel on the left is a photograph of the current site. The panel on the right is this redesign, running live in an inline frame you can scroll.
- The navigation bar is cut off mid-word at “COMMERCIAL”.
- The page continues past the right edge of the screen.
- A horizontal scrollbar sits at the bottom of the viewport.
- The page is 390px wide on a 390px screen.
- Nothing is cut off at either edge.
- There is nothing to drag sideways.
What changed, line by line
Thirteen findings from the front page, the archive, the newsletter link, the podcast feeds and the network log. Each one is a fact about the site as it shipped, not an opinion about the design.
| Metric | Now | Proposed |
|---|---|---|
Page width on a 390px phone Measured as document.documentElement.scrollWidth in a real browser. The current page is 2.6× wider than the screen, so every headline has to be dragged sideways to finish. | Now1026 px | Proposed390 px |
Viewport meta tag Without it a phone browser assumes a desktop page and zooms out. This one tag is the root cause of the overflow above. | NowMissing | ProposedPresent |
jQuery version Sixteen years old. Loaded on every page from Google's CDN. | Now1.4.2 (Feb 2010) | ProposedNone needed |
Dead third-party scripts Recorded from the browser console on the live site: addthis.com no longer resolves as a domain at all, and both the Twitter feed and the Disqus comment box are requested over plain http:// from an https:// page, so the browser blocks them outright. Also loading: Google ga.js and SWFObject for Flash. | Now5 still loading | Proposed0 |
Analytics The site still calls ga.js. Google stopped processing Universal Analytics hits on July 1, 2023 and removed the platform on July 1, 2024, so nothing has been recorded for three years — and no advertiser can be shown what a placement is worth. | NowNone collected | ProposedReady |
Social sharing cards There is no og: or twitter: markup anywhere. Every story shared to Facebook, X or LinkedIn posts as a bare link with no image and no headline. | NowNo tags at all | ProposedFull Open Graph |
News thumbnails The full-size photo already exists on the server at 400 px. The site renders it at 100 px. | Now100 px wide | ProposedFull width |
Ad units The IAB dropped the 468×60 banner from its standard ad portfolio in 2011. Advertisers today buy responsive and mobile-first units, so the old layout limits what inventory can even be sold. | Now468 × 60 | ProposedResponsive |
Layout method Table layout cannot reflow, which is why the page cannot adapt to a narrow screen. | Now5 nested tables | ProposedCSS grid |
Archive calendar One link in the archive month navigation reads ?year=2026&month={ts '2026-09-01 00:00:00'} — a raw ColdFusion timestamp that was never rendered, sitting in the page for anyone to see and for Google to index. The archive itself is the paper's oldest asset: 2003 to today, around twenty stories a day. | NowLeaks server code | ProposedClean links |
Newsletter signup The Subscribe button in the header points at av8r.net, which answers 403 over https and does not serve the domain at all. The signup page on your own domain answers HTTP 200 with a ColdFusion error inside it, so search engines index the failure as a normal page. Every click on Subscribe is a lost reader. | Now403 Forbidden | ProposedWorking form |
Podcast audio All 45 episodes across the three podcast feeds are listed with an http:// address. A player or browser on a secure page blocks that as mixed content, so the audio never starts — even though the same files already answer over https on your own server. | NowBlocked in browsers | ProposedPlays |
Visible broken element The sidebar permanently reads "Please wait while our tweets load". It calls a 2013-era API over plain http:// from an https:// page, so the browser blocks it outright. | NowTwitter box never loads | ProposedRemoved |
The contact page still lists three chat services that no longer exist
Copied verbatim from the live contact page on August 11, 2026. MSN Messenger closed in 2013, Google Talk in 2017, and Microsoft retired Skype on May 5, 2025. All three are still printed under the phone number, directly beneath two email addresses that do work.
This demonstration was built from Aero-News Network’s own stories and photographs, so the comparison is like for like. It is an unsolicited proposal and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Aero-News Network. Nothing here is for sale.
Open the redesigned front page