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Worst Web Sites of 2009: July - October #11-20
Web design is an art. Great web design occurs when design and content are seamless and you don't notice its greatness. With great web design, it's easy to find the information you need. The content makes you want to return again and again and, most importantly, great design gives credibility to the company/organization.
Obviously, the sites that follow aren't examples of great web design and we have two more months to go.
11. Mercedes Restaurant
Vincent Flanders' comments: You have to like the date at the bottom of the page — 2004. Now you know why I don't like to see dates on web sites unless you keep them…uh…up to date.
The colors are rather ugly (I'm hoping their restaurant isn't using the site's color scheme) and that huge image in the middle of the page should remind us all:
The good news is they have menus. The bad news is they don't mark them with PDF icons.
Other comments #1: The food may be great, and the service may be impeccable, but these folks need to think a lot more about intelligent branding, because visually, this site is a pig. It just feels amateurish and clumsy at best. This is not a way to encourage customers, or investors.
Other comments #2: Proof, yet again, that even with good tools (Dreamweaver), you can still create a crappy web site. Great home page — Google cannot find a single word to index.
Other comments #3: Thank goodness their site is copyrighted, maybe no one else will screw up a site as bad as these morons. The menu should be page one. Clicking on a menu link is equivalent to opening a menu in a sit-down restaurant. The menu should be there. A food menu should not include descriptors like juicy, fresh, homemade, garden fresh, famous, succulent, etc. Chain restaurants should have standard menus and prices, these are not.
12. FOTV
Vincent Flanders' comments: Just saying “the site is using Microsoft FrontPage Themes” is enough to explain away the ugliness. You have to admire the 3-D text — especially the word “Fiesta.” Even web sites for gaybars have more sense than to use this color scheme (I'm basing this on my Google searches).
Don't forget the Mission Statement on the home page. Only non-profit organizations should prominently display Mission Statements. As someone so wisely put it, “Every Mission Statement can be reduced to ‘All Babies Must Eat.’"
The TITLE tag for the home page is the ever-so-useful “Home.” We have at least one “Under Construction” page.
The Table of Contents page is basically useless. Most of the link names don't tell you what you're going to see when you click. If there's one thing, you should have learned by now is that when you see a "Click Here" link, it could be NSFW — like this link — and scary and disgusting.
Other comments #1: Praise the Lord, Alleluia, the web site is copyrighted and will never reproduce.
Other comments #2: IMHO, either you have exciting stuff that other people (besides your mother) will be pleased to see (in which case, by all means list it!) or you... don't. If you don't, then don't create (or at least don't publish) a list of nothing. It just makes it look EVEN MORE like you don't know what you're doing.
13.
FlatPak
Vincent Flanders' comments: Flash-based Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN). I shake my head every time I see a site like this. It appears — and it's important to stress the word “appears” — that this is a company with a really cool product who've ruined their site by trying to be…really cool.
I suspect they've looked at too many architectural firms for influence. We don't need the Flash and we don't need the MMN. It's that simple.
Other Comments #1: This is just stupid and ridiculous. I go to every page I'm supposed to, randomly click on A, B, C etc., to find out information. I don't know what this company does and, after going through that site, I don't care to know what the company does.
Other Comments #2: The preferred method of cooking Mystery Meat? Flash frying.
At least most MMN attempts some kind of iconography, albeit idiosyncratic. In this case, Mystery Meat is brought to you by the letter 'A'.
14. Water on Wheels
Submitter's comments: I was reading virtually every article I could find on your site the other day… so when I came across this site, naturally I thought of you.
Here I was looking for 72hr-kit water storage with wheels…but I ended up with the above. Ouch.
Vincent Flanders' comments: Just like Peter, Paul, and Mary I've been wondering “Where have all the beveled edges gone?” Turns out, they've gone to Water on Wheels. Oh, almost every other graphic mistake is there, too. My favorite is the mouseover images that aren't there. I've also never seen so many different button types on the menu.
The site's tag line “Efficiency in Motion by Creating Effectiveness!” means absolutely nothing.
Other Comments #1: Shouldn't one's web site suggest competence and professionalism? Even though the folks probably know what they are doing and may even do a great job, the site looks really cheap; this would not encourage me to use their services.
Somehow, I never expected to see the word "HOLISTIC" associated with water transport.
Also, I like doves and God knows I have great respect for the American flag, but the way each of these items is abused here makes me want to weep bitterly.
Other Comments #2: This site looks like it was written in the office, published on a test server, then copied over by winhttrack... if you are the owner, simply transfer the files.
Their 404 (file not found http response) is a 200 (OK) which returns a MSIE formatted 404 (file not found) page on HTML files. It's serving me a custom 404 page that is almost indistinguishable from MSIE 404 which caused me some confusion as to what was happening initially. Don't do something that browsers already do for you. Either leave the 404 alone or serve something better.
Another sign of structural problems: 642 of 1724 links are dead, most of them referencing button images.
Then there's this:
http://www.wateronwheels.com/../localhost/C_/User...
*facepalm*
On the plus side, at least the designer, who may not be the owner, may not be getting the traffic he wants. He MISSPELLED his email address at least once on the main index pages.
15. Green Mountain Mall
Submitter's comments: Bright colors! Did they use a black and white monitor to create this site or was the person just color blind? And does anyone care where the gas meter room is located? (See “Lay out” button at top.)
Vincent Flanders' comments: Tomorrow, I'm going to feature a very, very important non-profit web site that also doesn't understand the concept of contrast. Today's sucker understands it even less and it's amazing to me that anyone can look at the site and read anything.
“Lay out” should be “Layout” and there should be some indication this is a PDF file. It isn't very helpful to have the URL as your TITLE tag.
16. Neck and Back Pain Chiropractic
Submitter's comments: Here's an example of awesome Search Engine Optimization. EVERYTHING is an image. Horrible title tags and, of course, it's a chiropractic site.
Vincent Flanders' comments: Everything is actually 56 images. I went to Summit Media and used their Online Spider Simulator to check out today's site. The report was quite interesting as this graphic shows. There are only nine words on the whole page — Neck and Back Pain Chiropractic, LLC – Dr. Malcolm Hill — for search engines to use to index the page. Oh. Those words come from the TITLE tag, not from the body of the page.
The shadows on the text make it harder to read. On the positive side: it's a good domain name and the doctor looks like a doctor. It's a high-quality photo and you would feel comfortable going to him. If you don't agree, take a look at this made-up version of his web site with a new “doctor's” photo added <grin>.
Neck and Back Pain Chiropractic
Other comments #1: A nice-looking page, at least. I don't have any issues with the doctor's photo; the obvious (to me) intention is to give the home page a personal "from-me-to-you" feel. It's just a shame about all the images. It's also too bad that there were no knowledgeable developers around to properly implement what is arguably the best-looking Chiropractor site I have ever seen.
Other comments #2: Fireworks + Dreamweaver. This is site created by an artist who created the entire home page in Photoshop and then let Fireworks cut it into pieces. There used to be more sites similar to this when Adobe GoLive (and ImageReady) was popular with a certain crowd.
Other comments #3: The page appears to have been built to fit a 15" screen on my 17" LCD. So much real estate was wasted that the page requires scrolling. The shadowing effect makes reading the white font an even more difficult task. Wonder if he has a dietician and doctor of divinity degrees also. Can I get an order of fries and a bible with that?
17. Cyprus Icon Artist
Submitter's comments: This is a web site about a religious icon painter in Cyprus. What's truly astonishing and unique about this web site, is that it has not one, but TWO splash pages (the one a simple image and the other one is Flash). After the splash screen, you are presented with a wonderful example of Flashturbation and the background music of religious singing. The whole web site is Flash based.
Vincent Flanders' comments: I would have bet serious money that a two-splash screen web site no longer existed. What do I know? There's nothing here that couldn't be done with some JavaScript platform (JQuery and Mootools come to mind) and HTML. I'm using one on this page. Click the religious icon below to see a bigger image.
This person does fantastic work. Wow! It's beautiful.
Because he's using Flash, the text is too small and it's difficult to read. The pictures are obviously out of proportion. We don't need the music. We get it. Religion.
“But Vincent, don't art web sites get a pass?” Normally, yes. The two Splash pages are just wrong wrong.
18. True Life Church
Vincent Flanders' comments: My biggest complaint is all the graphics that look like links, but they aren't. Also, where's the focus? What do you want me to look at and what do you want me to do? The big graphics at the top of the page aren't links.
On some of the subpages, we have music that automatically plays and there's no need to have music. Like so many sites, the events page hasn't been kept up to date and they mention their annual church picnic which happened in July. The site eats up 1.5Mb of bandwidth. I think a little more text and a lot less graphics would be helpful. A lot of the site isn't finished, but I am.
Other comments #1: Yet another Christianity web site…I think you should have a category, "God Doesn't Know How To Design a Web site" or something.
Other comments #2: The open page links remain live, the involuntary Flash, video, and audio flatlines my processor, every page seems to require scrolling, oodles of font styles, and there are unnecessary spaces between lines of narrative. The huge banner, page link buttons, font, and whitespace render the site almost useless.
Two rules improve every web site:
- Page links across the top of every page.
- No vertical scrolling.
Other comments #3: Is it gaudy? Yes. Is it unfocused? Yes. Is it a victim of code-bloat? Yes. Overall, does it suck? Yes.
True artistry is expressed by what you leave out rather than what you add. A bit of loving care from someone who knows what he is doing could improve this site tremendously. All that being said, even if the site sucks from a design viewpoint, at least they giving a sound message, and are not preaching some nutjob doctrine that is guaranteed to embarrass fellow Christians.
19. Surviving Niburu
The History Channel has been running a bunch of shows (which you can buy on DVD) about how the world's going to end in 2012. Here's one and here's another. Basically, here's the core of the story:
It is a doomsday that is foretold in The Mayan Calendar, the Chinese oracle of the I Ching… even an internet-based prophetic software program: December 21st, 2012. Is there any truth to the prophecy that the world will end on that specific date? And why do so many oracles throughout history seem to point to that same dreaded doomsday?
I've got a “Future Map of the United States 1998-2001″ which, believe it or not, hasn't come true yet. I think people are still talking up the subject, but I'm willing to bet the dates have been changed to protect the erroneous. When I originally bought it I hung it up in my office and it was a wonderful conversation piece; otherwise, it was worthless.
Maybe the world will end in 2012. If it does, it will be because of all the sucky web sites about predicting the end of the world like today's sucker.
20. WeighMax Precision Scales
Submitter's comments: I was looking for a postal scale the other day when I ran into this site.
The front page has dark gray letters on a light gray background. Sure most of the text is too small to be readable. But what really sets this page apart from most crappy pages of this nature is on top of the Flash — the totally inexplicable “Welcome to http://www.WeighMax.com” in that neat “In the future, letters will not be human readable” font.
Click on the Mailing postal scale link. Yep, there is not a better way to showcase your products than to take a large picture and use HTML to make it into a thumbnail. I also doubt if anyone would comment if the large bit of moving orange wasn't there at the top.
Vincent Flanders' comments: Does anybody ever look at their web site? Here's a screenshot. Scroll down and ask yourself, “Can anyone except a fighter pilot or professional athlete read the text?” There's not enough contrast. The background color is #E9E9E9, while the text color is #777777. This would work only if the text were large and we know it's too small. There's a special spot in web design hell reserved for whoever's signed off on this.
The “Mailing postal scale” page doesn't work in Firefox. Somebody didn't use BrowserCam to check out their site in different browsers. This is an amateur's mistake. Oh, the HTML as thumbnail concept shows you're not even an amateur. Here's what one of the 220Kb scale images really looks like.
Other comments #1: The orange Flash animation is an unfortunate problem — failing to set your wmode to transparent in both the embed and the object tags (or even, shock horror, using a Flash insertion method that doesn't suck) is an easily correctable problem, and at least they're using Flash for what it's supposed to be used for on web sites — flashy non-essential stuff.
All the site really needs is a few simple corrections — mainly just the contrast, the thumbnails, and to replace all those text-images with actual text. If they really, really want to keep the space-age text, then there's sIFR or any one of the other alternatives for keeping those things machine/human readable.
Other comments #2: Seldom do we see so little displayed on so much real estate. This site wastes 3/5 of the page real estate, consequently more miniature pages have to be reviewed to see the full line of products. What's with the stupid animation? It's always a good idea to have a native speaker do the review of translated pages. What's with the damned animation?
