Submitter’s comments: Three days ago our local New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayune, decided to launch a “new and improved” website. There was nothing wrong with the previous design. While it was not flashy, it was very readable, easy to navigate and worked with all browsers, operating systems and platforms. It’s replacement is nothing short of horrendous!

The primary color is now a garish “seizure-inducing yellow”. The header now takes up the top third of the screen. The formerly user-friendly home page, where one could get all the news at glance, has been replaced by an “always on top” bar with flyouts that follows the user everywhere and pops out, seemingly at random, obscuring whatever one is attempting to read. The JavaScript that this bar uses causes the scrolling to be very jerky. The fonts look like they were chosen by a third-grader. Content, which used to be easily accessible, is now buried so deep that much of it is nearly impossible to find. The site no longer works on a iPad because flyouts are not supported. Several people have also reported that it no longer works with other browsers, such as Opera. I could go on, but you simply must see it for yourself!

The readers are outraged and are deserting nola.com like rats from a sinking ship. This change has generated over 350 comments so far (even more than when the Saints won the Super Bowl) begging The Times-Picayune to make it go away. Most, like myself, have clearly stated our intention to get our local news elsewhere. Several of the commentators are professional web designers themselves, and have made the observation that if they were to deliver such a product to a client they would promptly be fired. Unfortunately, all of our pleas are falling on deaf ears.

Below are links to the current site. For the sake of comparison, I’ve included a link to an Alabama news site which uses the old template. I am also including a link to the reader comments, some of which are quite funny! I hope you will have a look at this and consider my nomination of nola.com to be included in your gallery of “worst websites”.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I first went to this site with my Chrome browser and it was a disaster, as this screen capture demonstrates. I was using Windows 7 with a portrait monitor. The home page was just as bad in Internet Explorer 9. This is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

I loaded the page on my XP machine with IE 7 and everything looked worked just fine. The site worked fine on my iPad and the mobile version worked fine on my iPhone. The home page takes too long to load and the page feels like it is held together with wire and glue and could fly apart at any second. Oh, it did fall apart.

When it’s working, I think the site looks fine; however, I’m not the target audience. I’m coming to it without a history. Hopefully, they tested this site with current users. I think the old site looks terrible. It’s cluttered like so many other newspaper sites, but it’s a comforting and familiar site to its old audience. Once the kinks are worked out, I think people will like the site.

The Times-Picayune

Submitter’s comments: It sucks.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ah, this site brings back those wonderful childhood memories of my mother yelling, “If you don’t shape up I’m going to send you to Culver Military Academy!” Culver, by the way, is a much better looking website than FU.

The FU site reminds me a lot of this site (WPTS). It’s basically mediocre; however, they have committed two interesting mortal sins: the link for their mobile site is not at the top of the page, but toward the bottom. This doesn’t even take into account they should be using media queries to send people to the mobile site. The second mortal sin is that the mobile site is really just a text site and not a site made for mobile. They’re using Un Responsive Web Design instead of Responsive Web Design.

FU Military Academy

Submitter’s comments: The home page is merely the beginning. Different backgrounds for each page? Check. Text that doesn’t fit inside the table cells? Check. Text as logo? Double check. Text as logo that doesn’t fit in the header, and ends up covering over most of the first set of links? Triple check. Eye-hurting backgrounds on some pages? Check again.

*BREEEEEATH!!!*

Animated GIFs that serve no purpose? Check. Boring page? Check. Pick a font and stick with it please dear benevolent God why me? Check.

Anything else? Probably check.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I noticed that the ZIP LINE page states this attraction is coming in the 2012 season and that we should “(Check our website and Facebook for updates)” Uh…I’m on your web page.

We also have underscored text that isn’t actually a link and some pages mix flush-left and centered text. On the plus side, the text is large enough you can read it, unless the page color is too bright, like the Prices page.

The site gets a FAIL for mobile.

Thunder Island

Submitter’s comments: You don’t hear from me often, but when you do you can bet it’s because I’ve found something worthy of mention. To be honest, I find lots of sucky sites on the web, but I only send you the ones that truly, inarguably and inexcusably suck.

My nomination for the Daily Sucker is PenGun.com. It is abusive to the mind on so many levels. Everything from the color scheme to the background to the HR tag use just makes me cringe. Still, even with all of that I might have let it go, were it not for the Mystery Meat Navigation. That is where I draw the line.

The navigation on PenGun.com is flash-based, which is bad enough, but on top of that you can barely tell it is navigation because… there are no words in the default view, and all of the graphic links look exactly the same. You don’t get the privilege of seeing where you’re headed until you hover the mouse over each link. And, the descriptions promptly hide themselves after your mouse leaves the area. For further proof that we’re dealing with a Mystery Meat Navigation issue, you’ll find written instructions right below the navigation area telling you how to use it.

And just to add insult to injury, there is a sound when you hover over the navigation.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: ou need a monitor with 1600×1200 pixels before you can see the menu at the bottom. Why it’s there I just don’t understand.

Yes, it says the page is a personal page, but a personal page is a page about you and your life. Heck, even Vincent Flanders.com isn’t personal.

Stinger Penguns

Submitter’s comments: I just saw a local TV restaurant review on this place and thought I’d check it out.  Interesting splash page, except that seems to be the whole site. Talk about Mystery Meat Navigation!

I checked out the link that says “Amazing,” and several of the patron comments about their restaurant are negative. I thought at first maybe they were toning down the background for the critic’s quote page, but they didn’t.  I guess I’m just not hip enough for this website.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is a rare example of lose-lose-lose. We have Mystery Meat Navigation that isn’t suitable to view at work and, if you do view it, might cause epileptic seizures. What are these people thinking? They’re obviously not thinking about mobile users because I can’t get past the first screen on my iPhone, which is PFS (Pretty Stupid) for a restaurant. Massive, massive FAIL.

Justine’s Restaurant – NSFW and possibly seizure inducing!

Submitter’s comments: I was researching website design for a project I am doing and stumbled across this website. I’m not sure where to look because my gaze keeps going from one paragraph to another trying to figure out where to look as they all seem to compete for attention.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s your stereotypic crappy-looking website. A blind man would be offended by the color scheme. Check out the subpages, especially the “Small But Important Details” page.

I’ve often asked myself, “Why can’t we see that our web pages suck?” I’ve never figured out the answer to this question. The closest I’ve come is an article “Why can we predict other people’s behavior more accurately than our own?” To paraphrase, when we view other people’s behavior we consider the context. With our own behavior, we don’t.

In the world of web design, we can see other people’s mistakes, but not our own, because we’re too close and too familiar with our own pages. We can use our critical eye on another site, but our critical eye goes blind on our site.

Valley Isle Aquatics

After I typed the link, Satori hit me. The existence of bad web design can be explained by the following:

Submitter’s comments: Bad design, good prices

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s your stereotypic crappy-looking gun website. It mostly consists of one long page and looks like it was created back in late 1995.

I went to Google and typed in [guns NC] and didn’t find today’s sucker listed. What I did find was the Hyatt Gun Shop, which was the #1 search result. It won’t win any Webbys for design, but it won’t get listed on this site (unless there’s something horrible I didn’t see during my cursory visit). Hyatt’s look should be inspirational to Classic Firearms.

Classic Firearms

Here’s a link to one of my YouTube videos about another gun site.

Submitter’s comments: No mystery here. Ouch. Very 1990′s.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It is very 1990′s. I’m old-fashioned. I like my background images to tile without noticeable seams. I like for my pages to have a consistent look, although since the site uses frames I know I haven’t left the site when I click on a link in the left frame. When I click on the “Klamath Chamber” link, I’m taken to a page where one of the top links is “Sample Page” and that’s exactly what it is.

Trees of Mystery

Submitter’s comments: I used Google to search for “best learn spanish sites” and the top result was this page.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Somebody in the SEO community needs to figure out why this website ranks so high. It violates every positive web design concept we have. The site’s success also makes me believe the Web Standards gods are full of it. Yes, there’s content—plenty of it—but it’s mostly on the home page. A very long home page that weighs in at approximately 6Mb. A home page that has a Page Speed score of 50 and 2,673 errors.

All I should have to say to prove it sucks are two simple words—”Comic Sans.” There’s even an error I don’t recall seeing before. There are six graphics titled “Links” but none of them are actually links.

I even thought that the search query was a little funky. I tried [best websites to learn spanish] and it came up #2. Seriously, there’s something going on here that might be very important to the SEO community.

Best Spanish Websites

NVEnergize – An Example of Bad Web Design for April 15, 2012

Submitter’s comments: AHHHHHH!

What rule doesn’t this website break? Constant scrolling whilst you move your mouse, plus the loading page just looks like the whole website (because who’s going to think that a barometer {I think it is} going upward SLOOOOOOOOWLY is a loading page?)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Initially, I wasn’t sure if this qualified. Then I started scrolling and ran into a bunch of Mystery Meat Navigation. The worst culprit is “Renewable Generation.” You have to mouse over the first solar panel to bring up the tooltip. You would think that it would be enough to mouse over any other part of the building. Nope. That seems like an incredible oversight and I can’t believe someone at NVEnergy didn’t notice. When you mouse over the house to the right, there’s no link. You have to go up to the top of the hill for “Traditional Generation.”

Finally, why are they using the secure https protocol?

NVEnergize

Vincent Flanders’ comments: My daughter said, “One of my friends posted on Facebook, ‘Two gay men just brought VD into my house.’” Naturally, my interest was piqued. The “VD” turned out to be “Voodoo Doughnuts” instead of something more salacious. Of course, I went to the VD website and immediately decided they were using Mystery Meat Navigation because I didn’t see a normal menu. Wrong. I use a portrait monitor and, as you can see from this screen capture, the menu is at the bottom of a very long page. The page isn’t so long on a monitor in landscape mode, but the menu is not on the first screen. Like every normal user, I don’t want to figure out where the navigation is located. I just want to find it now.

VD is using a technique I haven’t seen in a long time—they’re disabling the right mouse click. I realize their images should be protected, but they are using watermarks. Anybody who really wants the images knows how to get them, so I’m not sure why they’re disabling the right click.

As someone who knows his way around doughnuts, their menu looks exciting and I’m sure their doughnuts are just as great as their names (Cock-N-Balls is my favorite name for a doughnut). All VD really haa to do is make it easier to enter the site. I can overlook the rest of the design because this is the type of business that can have a fun website. Dunkin’ Donuts can’t and doesn’t.

Voodoo Donuts

Submitter’s comments: I don’t know what to say about this god-awful abomination of a website.

It has:

• Ungodly amounts of animated gifs.
• It disables user scrolling and continuously scrolls upwards.
• Has an excess of excess of angels.
• There’s a golden Jesus thing.
• And more.

WARNING: STROBE-LIKE EFFECTS COULD CAUSE SEIZURES

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think I’ve found the bottom of web design. The Web of Trust doesn’t like this site at all, but for reasons of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. I don’t like it because it sucks more than any other site has ever sucked. Jesus didn’t weep when he saw this site. You can’t weep when you’re eyes are burned out of your head.

The Afterlife

Submitter’s comments: Two great tastes in one- protection from fraud and a ministry. At least, I think that’s what it is. They are on patrol to protect people from scammers claiming to represent police and firefighters’ organizations and other charity groups. Their web site could use some re-organizing and focus.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: These two disconnected concepts reminds me of a joke home page I once created for the “Bakesfield School of Law and Auto Body Repair.” I’ve heard of people receiving a calling to save the sick and dying children in India but, hey, why not save Americans from scammers. It’s not like we’re doing a good job of protecting ourselves.

Speaking of bad jobs, this website is a jumble. We’ve got a small logo, large graphic that doesn’t really represent anything, multiple text sizes, multiple colors, centered text along with flush-left text, colored divider bars, a home page that goes on forever and other types of mistakes found on Over-the-top Websites. I’m sure they provide a wonderful service, but their site doesn’t reflect this fact.

Police Fire Crime Line (pfcl.org)

Submitter’s comments: This one really HIT HIT HIT me in the face!! It still hurts and my eyes are still twirling around…LOL

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The page submitted is for chocolate bouquets.

At least you can read the text. In many ways it looks like you’d think a gift website would look. It’s not spectacularly sucky, just a little tacky and inelegant.

Elegance With Style

Submitter’s comments: Don’t even know where to start with this one. I’m sure you’ll do a better job than me.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Actually, it’s fairly nice for an Over-the-Top Website (OTTW). My favorite part of the home page has to be the use of logos from different media organizations. You can’t click them and go anywhere, but they lend an aura of authenticity to the site’s material. Interestingly, the red triangle on the home page, which I’m assuming is the Bermuda Triangle, doesn’t seem to match up to Wikipedia’s Bermuda Triangle. Who to believe? Who to believe?

This home page is different from your average OTTW because it doesn’t keep going and going down the home page. It’s compact. The navigation menu looks strange—the lines above the menu items runs through the text. If what’s at the top left is the logo, then it’s too small and unreadable. There are drop shadows on the

The subpages seem to look different from every other subpage. My favorite page is the Bigfoot/Sasquatch Overview page. Make sure your sound is turned up. There are lots of contrast issues, with the color of the links on the green background being the most glaring. On the plus side, this page is not all that long. On the negative side, clicking the Home link doesn’t take you to the real home page.

Other pages have text that’s too small, backgrounds that repeat, lack of links to the home page, justified text, animated images and the other usual issues found in OTTW.

Bermuda-Triangle.org

Submitter’s comments: I used to think your site had too many ads. I apologize. If you look at The Jerusalem Post with and without ads (I use an ad-blocker), you’ll notice that the site looks just fine without ads. When you see the home page with ads, it’s a totally confusing mess.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Apology accepted. I guess. Ads are good. Ads are necessary. But, like the submitter said, The Jerusalem Post’s home page is very disjointed and confusing with the ads (screenshot). In fact, my initial reaction was that some putz designed it. However, when the ads are removed, the design is obviously professional (screenshot). You have a lot of white space on the right side, though.

When I went to the Post’s site, a very strange text ad was at the top offering Jewish men the chance to meet Mormon women. I don’t keep up on religious practices, but this doesn’t seem logical.

As far as newspapers go, the current poster child of all that is good in web design is The Boston Globe. It’s often used to tout Responsive Web Design. Here’s a screen shot of The Globe’s home page. Here at WebPagesThatSuck the sites almost always use Un Responsive Web Design.

The Jerusalem Post

Eric Anderson’s take on  how I feel all the time. - http://bit.ly/FPyHgK

Submitter’s comments:I found this site after watching a video of the fountain in Osaka City Station.

These folks sell equipment to make fountains that create words and art. They have a skippable intro video, which I think is fine because the product is neat, but once you’re past it, it’s nothing but Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The top menu is in a shade of unreadable yellow and the pages move too fast to read. I don’t know how to stop them. The only Flash that’s needed would be to showcase the installations; otherwise, get rid of the Flash. The MMN is frustrating because you have to return to it time and time again because the subpages only have links back to the home page. Oh. Chrome kept blowing up because of the Flash.

BAELI New York

Submitter’s comments: The ultimate in Mystery Meat Navigation.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Initially, I thought this was what happens when Pinterest meets Mystery Meat Navigation, but I was wrong. Turns out these are Blogger Dynamic View Gadgets. One of the problems I have with templates and widgets and gadgets is the creators give people options that are stupid. It’s like giving a machine gun with the safety off to your average 3-year old. They’re going to make the wrong choice. Templates and gadgets and widgets are the same way. The creators should offer choices, but they should be rational choices.

I don’t have any idea what the site is about other than someone’s ruminations on life. Even if it’s a personal site, the issue is don’t use stupid widgets—especially if you’re a business. To be fair to Blogger, their video shows how these gadgets should be used, but it assumes talent that even I don’t have. I’ve been trying to make a stupid Pinterest version of my home page, but I’m Masonry and Javascript impaired. Any help would be appreciated.

Raising Overcomers

Submitter’s comments: This one reminds me of old GeoCities sites from about 1997. It’s painful to look at, thanks to the total lack of contrast (black on dark blue? yellow on greenish?), the blinking things make me want to hurt my browser, and they have no clue what “anti-aliasing” could possibly mean, nor why something anti-aliased for a white background should not be put on that blue … stuff.

It’s quite a large site, and every page is more hideous than the last. There are imagemaps for no good reason, graphicized text to make sure search engines can’t see the navigation and things in the source code that make me cringe…empty links galore, that kind of thing. And these people are selling to multi-million-dollar clients.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Normally, I might say “Oh, nobody uses their website because they have a catalog and that’s what people use. Wrong. They have a “No printed catalog is available” message at the bottom of the page. Oh, they underscore the message—which is wrong because only links should be underscored. The copyright is from 1997-2012. I think the submitter is right. The site is stuck in 1997.

This is a real company with a really bad website—one that is awfully close to being a Loon Website.

The site is trying to be cute by redirecting folks. If you want to see the site:

1. Copy this url – http://www.pnwx.com/
2. Open new tab or window in your browser
3. Paste in the URL
4. Hit the ENTER key

Or if you want to read the diatribe - Pacific Northwest X-ray. I haven’t read it because I’ve heard it all before <grin>.

Submitter’s comments: A nomination for the Worst Web Page EVER!!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Not sure if it’s the worst web page ever, but it certainly is the worst page today.

I don’t understand the light yellow text that runs throughout the page. Are they trying to stuff keywords? Are they trying to talk about their product? It’s in English so you’d think I know, but I don’t.

Teacup Pigs Full Grown

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Technically, this page is trying to “save” all the “Under Construction” animated GIFs, so it could be looked at in a positive light. On the other hand, it’s trying to save all the “Under Construction” animated GIFs and that doesn’t seem like a good idea. Billy @zoompf found this site and tweeted it.

If you want to see some amazing animated GIFs, try Reed & Rader.

Somebody at Lightspeed Software made an animation of me back on November 21, 1996. I can’t claim to be the first to be animated, but I’m among the early ones. You gotta love the Ben Franklin haircut.

Under Construction Animated GIFs

Submitter’s comments: Awesome grills. Not so awesome site.

First of all, there is a splash page with annoying music and flash. When I visit a page, I want in right away. I shouldn’t have to click “Enter.”

The colors are horrible for contrast, as in too much contrast. The background throughout the site is all black and the text is white. It hurts to look at it.

The navigation is not that great. Some links load PDF files without warning. It’s like the black hole of grill sites.

Grilling should be about outdoors and family fun, not ultimate blackness with somber music and text that burns your eyes.

I’m reminded of the movie “Spinal Tap” when I think about how much more black the site can be. The answer is NONE. NONE MORE BLACK.

If you go back to January of 2010, the site was actually somewhat appealing to the eye.

Let’s just say they made a change for the worse. Good grill, though.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The real home page scrolls horizontally forever on my system. I couldn’t get the newly released Snagit 11 to record the screen correctly, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or you can try this link to an MP4 file that shows the scrolling (your browser will need the QuickTime plugin).

TEC Infrared Grills

Vincent Flanders’ comments: My British readers are, as you might suspect, dignified, reserved and a bunch of other nice terms. They’re even polite when discussing the newly redesigned BBC Sport page. If you read between the lines, there seems to be a sense of anger and disappointment <grin>.

Submitter’s comments #1: Until the end of January 2012 the BBC Sport site was far the best UK site for general sports information, with clear, easily findable information about sports news, results and fixtures, but take a look round the site now.

Basic things that were previously available one or two clicks away from the home page, such as a list all of today’s football (that’s what you probably know as “soccer”) fixtures involving British professional teams, now take an age to find, and then you can never be sure that you have found everything because you have to check each individual English, Scottish or European league or cup competition to see if there are any matches.

And all this while having your eyes assaulted by seas of yellow in the name of branding. Other obvious failings are images with text obscuring important features, text not being left-aligned and “headlines” squeezed into a ridiculously narrow column down the centre of the page.

There are many more things wrong with this site detailed in the thousands of complaints listed at:

Live page issues
Changes to the BBC Sport website
More on our new website
Our new website – next steps

This is a worthy candidate for the Daily Sucker, and I would be amazed if doesn’t come near the top of the list of Worst Websites of 2012.

Submitter’s comments #2: The redone BBC Sports website is in my opinion one of the worst wastes of public money ever and as soon as you head on in there it reminds me of a hazard warning jacket with its profusion of YELLOW! But the most galling of  its glaring problems is how it is set out.

To
Read
Some
Of
Its
Editorial
Content
You
Have
To
Read
Like
This
All
The
Way
Down
The
Column.

The photos are alarming in that they have massive headlines blocking you from viewing the subject. An appalling waste of time, effort and licence payers money.

Submitter’s comments #3: I had to send this as the old site was easy to use, now it is just confusion :(

I used to be able to navigate everywhere by the sidebar in a standard fashion and it was easy to use. Now if I got to find a league from the top menu I get a box appear, however if I look for a team I’m taken to a new web page, it seems to be so cluttered.

Submitter’s comments #4: BBC’s new sports website has GOT to be a candidate for one of the worst designs of the year.  Just came into effect this past week.  What on earth were they thinking of?

Submitter’s comments #5: I am guessing that you have already been told about the “new & improved” BBC Sports website (who ever wrote new and improved obviously doesn’t know the meaning of improved) It is total crap, full of errors, badly designed, impossible to navigate or understand!

It’s the worst website of 2012, no matter what else comes along!

BBC Sports

Submitter’s comments: Even on a higher-resolution display, there are still two scroll bars.  Some text is graphic while other text is text.  Large graphics make for a slow download. How did they get people to pay for ads on a site as bad as this?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: On my portrait monitor system (width is 1200 pixels), there’s just one horizontal scrollbar which, of course, sucks. I looked at it on my landscape monitor and the page is approximately 1419 pixels wide. This certainly isn’t responsive web design.

The text is that marvelous gray known as #666. However, because the text is large you can actually read it. Kudos, I guess. On the other hand, the “Attendee Comments” on the top right can’t be read.

Primary Care Education