Web Pages That Suck -- Examples of Bad Web Design

These are the Daily Suckers -- Examples of Bad Web Design -- from WebPagesThatSuck.com. I couldn't predict every new sucky design technique that would come along when I wrote the book because there's always a new way to do something bad. This page will keep you up-to-date. Live examples.

My definition of "daily" is "whenever I'm in the mood."


Father Flanders' Sermon for Sunday, July 13, 2003

Just because Jesus miraculously turned water into wine doesn't mean he can miraculously turn your 1280- x 1024-pixel image whose file size is 1.8Mb into an image whose file size is only 74Kb just because you changed the WIDTH= and HEIGHT= attributes to WIDTH="420" and HEIGHT="336".

This mistake is so common that it's beginning to be as annoying to me as the confessions of the students of the young men of my Jesuit high school were to Father Ambrose "For your penance say three Hail Mary's" Forsthoefel.

Father Flanders is not going to recommend three Hail Mary's, but that you do the following (if you use a Macintosh, I can't save your soul):

1. Go to the Fookes Software site and download Easy Thumbnails. I'm not going to tell you how to use the program but anyone whose IQ is higher than an ice cube can figure it out. Instead of creating little, itty-bitty thumbnails, we'll use the program to reduce the size of the picture to the size specified in the IMG tag's attributes. I reduced the 1.8Mb picture down to 74Kb just by making a "thumbnail."

2. Go to the IrfanView site and download IrfanView. Even if you download Easy Thumbnails, you must download IrfanView because it's an extremely valuable graphics tool. Trust me on this one because I would not lead you into temptation or the Valley of the Shadow of Death. What you do is load your image into the program, press CTL-R to resize it, change the width parameter to what you want (the height is automatically adjusted) and then "Save as" but before you resave it using a new name, click on "Options" and set the "Save Quality" level to a small number. I used "37" and this reduced the file size down to 34Kb.

I just saved you a lot of bandwidth.

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Sunday, July 13, 2003

The Daily Sucker Backgrounder

The Daily Sucker contains material that should be considered updates to the book, "Web Pages That Suck." and Son of Web Pages That Suck. I can't see the future -- if I could, I'd be picking lottery numbers and stocks. The Daily Sucker features new sucky design techniques not in existence when the book was written. Since Web designers are stubborn, I also include old sucky techniques featured in the book. Maybe if they see a bad technique featured enough they'll stop using it.

The suckers are based on user input. You see a site that you think sucks and then e-mail the URL to me. No personal pages (personal pages are supposed to reflect the individual's personality, artistic freedom, and lack of taste -- a commercial site is about making money) or Web site designers (it would look like a conflict of interest). If I think there's some merit to your selection, I post it along with some commentary -- and quality commentary helps determine whether I use the suggestion. If you know of a site that qualifies, let me know.

The sucky example will usually be available for only 24 hours (or thereabouts -- weekends and egregious examples are exceptions) -- never to be seen again. Well, probably. Somebody could always suggest them again -- and they do.

E-mail Vincent