The Daily Sucker

Vincent Flanders’ comments: While I get hundreds of e-mails asking for a free site review, I rarely look at the sites in question. For some reason known only to God/Yaweh/Allah/Fill-in-the-blank, I looked at one such site because the author stated he didn’t know what was wrong with his design. I often get messages like this but, like I said, I took the bait.

It’s an all-text site so I said, “Hmm. I’ll change his home page around and use it as an example for the Daily Sucker.”

Please click on the link below, read the complete page and leave your own comments below in the Comments Section. The comments are not about WPTS (which we all know sucks), but this site that someone wanted me to critique.

What Is Wrong With My Web Page?

Submitter’s comments: He’ll entertain you with unforgettable classics from the past. He is available for all types of events including dinner entertainment, special engagements, weddings, birthday parties and much much more! Too bad his web site is entirely comprised of graphics used to represent what would otherwise be search-engine friendly text!

Folks, I present to you the poster child for don’t use graphics to represent text — Kent Chapman.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: He also is the poster child for bad TITLE tag — “index” — instead of something that would help the search engines index the site.

It’s a bunch of graphics that make up a 1Mb Flash movie. I can’t figure out if it would be an improvement if it were just one large graphic image. Oh, click each song one after the other. You’ll get an entertaining cacophony.

Kent Chapman

Submitter’s comments: Vikki Carr, who is somewhat famous and internationally known, must have the worst web site for a celebrity of her status.

Vincent Flanders’ CURRENT comments (02-17-08): I went back to look at the site and discovered it has been massively overhauled — and for the better. They also got the site moved to a .com from a .net — which makes the site more easily discovered. The site has improved by about 350%. Congrats.

For those of you who are wondering what the site looked like when I made my original comments, here’s the first 2,180 pixels (out of 16,720) of the home page.

Vincent Flanders’ ORIGINAL comments: Normally, I don’t discuss music sites because their fans will put up with just about anything (Coldplay’s Rush of Blood to the Head web site comes to mind). These sites tend to extravagant use of Flash and/or Mystery Meat Navigation.

Today’s sucker demonstrates the extravagant use of bad 1996 design. However, even 1996 web design isn’t stupid enough to put the navigation scheme halfway down the page. Oh, and the home page weighs in at 3.34Mb.

There are a lot of photos of Vikki with other people. Hint: Put these on a separate page like one of my favorite bands, the Gin Blossoms, did. They have a page called “Gallery” that deals with — guess what? — photos. Yes, yes, yes. I hate the Flash navigation on the Gin Blossoms’ site and the outdated information.

An addendum: Comparing the Gin Blossoms’ with Vikki Carr may be comparing apples with oranges. An apple-to-apple comparison would be Vikki Carr and Patti Page. Patti’s web site needs more contrast between the text and the background, but I think this overall look and feel should be something to aim for in Vikki’s web site.

Vikki Carr

Well, it’s not the whole site that has the second worst navigation, but the page you go to when you click first link of the home page menu.

I’m talking about the Colors page at Etsy.com. I said it was #2 on the 10 Worst Uses of Web Site Navigation for 2007.

I was reading TechCrunch today (one of my daily must-reads) and saw a headline that stated Etsy Raises $27 Million; Accel’s Jim Breyer Joins Board. Wow!

The rest of the site’s navigation appears to be your normal, easy-to-use Web 2.0 type of navigation and I like it quite a bit. It has a very clean feeling.

No, I’m not wrong about the Colors page sucking like a cheap vacuum cleaner. It’s only one page (an important page) and unlike most sites, Etsy has a lot of Heroin Content.

Submitter’s comments: The most shocking thing about this is that it was NOT made with Front Plunge. Mostly it is just ugly. Neato animated gif there on the front page. The Family and Friends Package page is almost unreadable.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It looks like the site was designed on a 640 x 480 monitor. Take a look at this BrowserCam screen 1280 x 800 screen capture.

Since the site uses frames, I can’t give you a direct link to the Family and Friends Package page, but it sucks. Obviously. The repeating background in the middle frame is tacky. Heck, it’s all tacky.

The Weather Vane Inn

(Once again, I apologize for the Daily Sucker icon appearing.)

A heat map is an important tool because it shows you where and on what your visitors click on a particular page. It’s not the only tool you should use, but it’s helpful in spotting trends and possible areas of confusion for your visitors. Online heat map services used to be expensive, but the prices have dropped to the level of If-You-Don’t-Use-Them-You’re-Stupid. I’ve been using Crazy Egg and it’s quite interesting.

So far, here is what I’ve learned from using heat maps:
Read the rest of this entry »

Submitter’s comments: I am a Harley rider and a couple of my friends have been asking me about attending one of the Easy Rider shows coming up. I have never been to one, so I thought I would look it up and see if I could get more info. I searched for it on Google and found a site that, well, sucks.

The main pages look like scans of magazines, scrunched down into some goofy border. I was surprised that there are actual links in there and even more surprised that they actually worked, well some of them did.

On the Photo Gallery page if you click on one of the city names, sometimes you actually get a gallery of a few photos. Other times you get one photo. Then some of the city links look like they are going to work, but nothing happens — I felt like I needed to click harder, then I realized “Dumb-a–, clicking harder isn’t going to make it work,it will only make your finger sore.”

After going to this site, I think I have decided to pass on the event.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The most important sentence in this review is — c’mon, you know what it is — “After going to this site, I think I have decided to pass on the event.” It’s a lost sale. Interestingly, the first city I clicked — Louisville (I can’t give you the direct link because the site uses frames) — didn’t work just like the submitter stated above. Well, actually I can give you the direct link, but you’re missing all the wonderful frame info.

It’s like I said in my book, “If you don’t look like a pro, the people will go.”

Easy Rider Events