One thing that annoys me a lot on the web is the extremely inefficient use of space on many (if not most) web pages. Why does the header always take up a third of the page? Or take a look at this:

That's a screen shot of my fantasy baseball league's live scoring page on a 21" monitor (1280x1040 resolution) where I've set the browser window size to 1024x768. The three things I really want to see on that page are: (1) The score of this week's match-up (5-4), (2) How each player is doing today (the section below the score) and (3) how this week's stats break down by category (which isn't even close to being on the page.. it's way below).

So the problem with this page is that we have about 9.5 inches of screen height to work with, and the score takes up almost 2 inches (it could easily take up 1/2 an inch), and the rest of the junk above the score takes up about 5 inches. The ad banner at the top is huge, but hey, it's supposed to generate money for the site, so I can accept that (and by accept I mean I block it with adblock of course, but it still takes up the space). The biggest problem is that the section between the top banner ad and the scoreboard takes up about 3.5 inches, which is more than a third of the page, yet conveys almost nothing. I'm quite aware that I'm on the Big Sky Baseball 2007 (listed twice for some reason) page, so maybe they could make that text a little smaller? There's also at least an inch of wasted white space in the "GameCenter" section. The links below "GameCenter" could be next to it instead of below for one thing.

Of course, this is only one of many web sites with similar problems, although this is about as bad as it gets.

I'm by no means web design expert, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. I even get annoyed by the space taken up by the header on my own website, UrbanDrinks.com, and it's only about an inch or so.