Yes, the overwhelming crush of traffic is behind many of the Web site’s failures. But the Web site was clearly far, far from prepared for traffic at anywhere near these levels. That’s a planning flaw: The Obama administration badly underestimated the level of interest. The fact that the traffic is good news for the law doesn’t obviate the fact that the site’s inability to absorb that traffic is bad news for the law.

Part of the problem, according to a number of designers, is that the site is badly coded, which makes the traffic problems more acute. There’s a darkly amusing thread on Reddit where web designers are picking through the site’s code and mocking it mercilessly. “They’re loading 11 CSS files and 62 (wat?) JavaScript files on each page, uncompressed and without expires headers,” writes Spektr44. “They have blocks of HTML inexplicably wrapped in script tags. Wtf?”

Some of the problems on the site don’t require any particular coding experience to identify. While the design is clean and clear, the instructions can be confusing. For instance, when you choose your username, the site says: “The username is case sensitive. Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-.”