Submitter’s comments: Found this site by accident—I still can’t figure out what possessed them to design the navigation they way they did. It took me a few seconds to even figure out how to get past the triangles and to some useful information, like what kind of company it is, etc. Bleh! Annoying music, too!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The home page is among the sillier home pages I’ve seen this year. It shouldn’t be necessary to say the FlashSplash page isn’t necessary, but the designers weren’t clever enough to understand this. IT ISN’T NECESSARY! I thought that each boomerang image would show a different piece of information when I moused over, but no. Once you click, you go to a home page that actually has a logical, readable FLASH menu at the bottom (don’t use Flash for menus). Unfortunately, I’m your typical marketing weasel and I got distracted by the falling squares and rectangles and then by the “click drag create” message.

The ADHD kicks in and soon I’m building little thingamajigs. What a waste. It’s like they set a trap for folks like me. Oh, it turns out they’re house builders.

A Happy and Prosperous New Year to Everyone!!

Longvue

Submitter’s comments: The thing is I’ve seen Tim Ellis perform and I met him at a Magic convention in 2004, and he’s a really good magician – probably one of the top ten magicians in the world. He also delivers a great lecture. Its actually a real shame that his web page is so lame.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’ve been enthralled by magic for the last…well, since I was six years old. In fact, I love it so much that I don’t want to know the secrets behind the illusions. It’s a shame that magic sites have to use stars as background as I’ve seen on a number of sites. Oh, and we have a fairly flagrant violation about using sound files.

The biggest problem is the lack of contrast between much of the text/links and the background. I wish I could make the lack of contrast disappear but, alas, I’m not a magician.

Magic Unlimited

Submitter’s comments: Last evening I opened a very handy Christmas present from my wife — an “Emergency Dynamo Lantern.” As the outside of the box describes it: “5 LED Bulbs,” “NO Batteries Needed.”"30 seconds of Hand Cranking generates 15-30 minutes of light!” It is manufactured by JLR Gear.

While my wife and daughter and son were cooking today’s feast, I typed the URL into the browser to learn what other handy products they make. The home page has pretty pictures, and the categories for their products are listed (sideways though). So, I click on “Products” and what do I get?

THIS AREA IS PASSWORD PROTECTED

PLEASE
ENTER YOUR PASSWORD” [login] (I’m ROTFLMAO)

Thank you for logging on to our site. Unfortunately, this section of the web site is for our retail customers and for our internal use only.

If you need help or more information about our products, please feel free to contact us at: 510-777-9894.

Their product is very handy. Their web site is very unhandy. I suppose they mean that only the retail resellers can have access. But, don’t most manufacturers also display what products they make, and, list the retail stores where you can go buy them?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Oh, boy! This is wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. As I wrote in Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015:

These ladies are laughing at you. Why? You designed your web site for your needs, not their needs. It gets worse. After they stop laughing, they’re going to one of your competitors’ sites and buy something…

Nobody cares about you or your site!

Really. What visitors care about is solving their problems. Now. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of these four problems:

1. They want/need information
2. They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
3. They want/need to be entertained.
4. They want/need to be part of a community.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand or to increase company sales by 15%. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems.

At the least, the link name should be changed to something like “Vendors Only.” Yikes.

JLR Gear home page

JLR Gear Products Page (password protected)

Whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope you enjoyed yourself. For reasons outside my control, I celebrate Christmas. I’ve added two new features:

Worst Web Sites of 2007 Part 4 — 16 new sites from October and November!

Worst Nonprofit Web Sites Part 2 — 8 more nonprofit web sites have been added.

I’m going through the list for December right now. 2007 is looking like the mother of all sucking web site years!

I hope to have December’s list up by New Year’s Day

Since I’m not a PHP programmer, the Daily Sucker icon is automatically inserted in each entry (anybody who knows how to fix this in WordPress, kindly send me the code). This entry doesn’t really suck.

For a limited time, the Nielsen Norman Group is giving away their PDF report from 2001 entitled Beyond ALT Text:
Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.

Nielsen Norman Group Report page

Submitter’s comments: Yes, this is for real.

Blinky text (in Firefox), marques, random justification, tiled background images, images in front of text (file of life page), links changing colors?, frames, etc. It’s an example of “How many annoying elements can I put on one page?”

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Don’t forget the animated divider bars.

Here’s another example of why you don’t put dates on a web page. Fortunately, the home page doesn’t have a date. Speaking of dates, I finally have proof that cops are psycho psychic. The Motor Vehicle Accident Statistics page is dated March 14, 1999. But the header says “Motor Vehicle Accident Statistics 2000.” Pretty impressive. They can see the future. I wonder if they knew I was going to make their site the Daily Sucker?

Some of the other pages are dated as follows:

12-10-99 Webmaster’s Comments

05-28-02 Domestic Violence and Records Request

10-19-03 Firearm Licensing Information

It looks like only the Department Roster is reasonably current.

Seekonk Police Department

Submitter’s comments:
I think you will love that the “English version” text moving around in the screen when you mouse over. Also, the left menu is sideways.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I also like the fact the TITLE tag is “ydta.” Yeah, the search engines are going to know it stands for “Young Design Talent Awards.” Sure.

Hong Kong Young Design Talent Awards

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I was reading a post on a Microsoft blog about how the yet-unreleased Internet Explorer 8 passed the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 test. Hmm…Microsoft and web standards in the same sentence? One of the ADD thoughts that ran through my brain was, “Hey, go run Microsoft’s home page through AccessColor’s color contrast and brightness test.” The results will have nothing to do with web standards, just the ability to code a page in such a way that the text is readable against the background. It’s all about visual contrast.

I ran Microsoft’s home page through the analyzer and received the following results:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 62.13% of the total text.
   A Fail message is displayed next to the HTML source line.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 0.53% of the total the text.
   A Warning message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

Now, I’ve never met a stupid person who worked for Microsoft (some have been a little too Lifespring-ish for my taste), so I have to ask myself, “Don’t they understand it doesn’t cost millions of dollars to make your page readable?” OK, they’re stupid.

Microsoft’s Home Page

Submitter’s comments: This is the web site for my home town of Covington, Indiana. It’s so bad that I’m going to make a donation to the town in support of a better web site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Personally, I think you should give your money to some nonprofit who can do some good. Doesn’t anybody understand the concept of visual contrast? I ran the home page through AccessColor and received the following results:

Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 15.22% of the total text.

Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 18.84% of the total the text.

We also have multi-colored divider bars, centered and flush-left text, multi-colored text, and they’ve put the date the site was last edited (March 3, 2006). Oh, and the TITLE tag for the home page is “Home,” which doesn’t help the search engines index the site.

Covington Business Association