The Daily Sucker: Current Live Examples of Bad Web Design Techniques

Please read the FAQ -- especially the section, "Why does your site suck?"


Daily Sucker for Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Submitter's comments: Talk about Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN)! All I wanted to know was what books had been published, what movies had been made and the next release. Instead of a clearly laid out site, I'm subjected to weird icons (click on the glasses to return to the home page?? huh?). Never did find what I needed. Fortunately, mugglenet.com does better and actually lists the books written by J.K. Rowling. Neither seems to link to someplace I can purchase the book. Are you kidding me?

Vincent's comments: Since we have Christmas coming up I thought I'd put the suckers for the 25th and 26th up on Friday. 

As far as MMN goes, you're looking at a very expensive cut of meat -- she's got the money for the best Mystery Meat money can buy. She should have an obvious link to a site that would answer your questions because there are lots of folks like you who want just the facts.

After seeing the home page and realizing it wasn't going to tell me what I needed to know, my first reaction was to go to IMDB.com and search for Harry Potter. It gave me a list of all past and the next two future movies in the series. I also discovered that Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter, also likes my favorite defunct band Rage Against The Machine.

Actually, I don't mind the Harry Potter site. Yes, it's stupid, but her audience expects a site like this where everything is mysterious and hidden and you have to solve riddles to get inside and navigate around the site. On the other hand, there are designers saying, "Yeah, that's how we should make our site." Oh, that would include our recent sucker selection Gaia Group. It's OK for JK but not GG.

J. K. Rowling


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Daily Sucker for Monday, December 25, 2006

Submitter's comments: Just thought I'd draw your attention to this one. I really thought all-Flash sites were (almost) a thing of the past, but sadly they are still around. Not only does it take an age for each page to load, the layout is clumsy, the links are difficult to read, and that's when you can get your cursor to them as the pop-up menus have a mind of their own. And when it takes 25 seconds for a simple contact page to load, well, I'm out of there! Please, everybody repeat, "Flash is Evil!" End of rant.

Vincent's comments: Flash can be evil. The first thing that scared me is that the site is for an energy drink put out by GlaxoSmithKline -- a drug company. Hmm. It's another stereotypical Flash site and my major complaint is the small text and lack of contrast between the background and the text. For a Flash site, it's also pretty ugly. Once again, it's a silly site appealing to an audience that expects this type of nonsense.

Lucozade Sport


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Daily Sucker for Friday, December 22, 2006

Submitter's comments: This is a philosophy web page that sucks. Wow. An extra star for the 5 minute audio clip that loads in the background.

Vincent's comments: Gee. I thought aesthetics was a branch of philosophy. Oh, it is! Obviously, our Daily Sucker page must have slept through that lecture.

Normally, I tend to view a teacher's web site as a personal site, but I guess I'm in one of those moods. A 1.2Mb MP3 file that you can't shut up probably pushed me over the edge. I also recently railed against 3-D graphics in a video.

I think it might have been better to follow the design of the Faculty home page.

Brad's Philosophy 102 Page


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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.

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