Original WPTS circa 1996-1998.

For those of you who don't want to read the background, let's go directly to the tour.

Bad Web design is like a dirty diaperI'm grateful that Web Pages That Suck is a popular site on the Internet. Originally, I had two goals when I created the site. The first was to get out of teaching a class on Web design. As you all know, it's very easy to teach someone how to create a page but it's difficult to teach them how to design a page. The second goal was to help people and businesses from embarrassing themselves. Once, it was OK to slap any old thing up there and be done with it. Now, people look at a poorly designed site and ask, "Do we want to do business with them?" Upside magazine phrased it best when it discussed the importance of marketing: "Word of mouth, frequency of press appearances, Web site quality and the frequency and quality of advertisements all serve to create the image of a 'real company.'"

The purpose of this web site is to help people design effective and aesthetically pleasing web pages. My methodology is somewhat different — I firmly believe that if a person is exposed to bad web page design they'll be less likely to use these techniques in the pages they create. People often commit the same mistakes over and over and over and over — you get the point. By pointing out these mistakes, and being told that they are mistakes, you can avoid them when you design your web pages.

People say, "Why don't you teach good design?" Well, in my books I do. But the important thing to realize is "good design" is relative on the Web as it is in the world of art. In the art world, almost everyone realizes that Elvis on velvet is not art and shouldn't be emulated. It's very difficult to teach what's good art or good design because that's subjective.

Vincent Flanders

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