The Daily Sucker

Vincent Flanders’ comments: As I promised on Friday, here’s the leading contender for the Worst Web Site of 2008. A regular Daily Sucker entry doesn’t do it justice.

Possibly the Worst Web Site of 2008

On Monday, the Daily Sucker will feature the leading contender for the Worst Web Site of 2008. It’s a large organization’s attempt to be hip and cutting edge, but they only end up looking like morons who’ve cut themselves with bleeding edge design. It features Flash, crosshair telescopic sight navigation, falling links, and an incredibly stupid rendition of the Matrix. When you see it, you’ll ask, “What the heck were they thinking?”

Submitter comments: This site is terrible. I have to admit, while clicking through this site, I’ve laughed as hard as I have all month.  

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Why in the name of all that is holy (or profane) do we have pictures of the county seat taking up most of the screen? And those arrows…you can’t click them (although that’s what it looks like).

This site has so many problems I don’t know where to begin:

• The background image
• The scrolling text
• The pink menu buttons (halfway down the page) with the white background showing.
• The navigation starting so low in the page.

Yikes.

Auglaize County, Ohio

One of the most horrendous TV shows in the history of TV was “Cop Rock.” Cops and criminals and people would just start singing in the middle of the action. When I told my daughter about this show, she wouldn’t believe me.

Here are a couple of YouTube links to prove my point.

Cop Rock 1

Cop Rock 2 (May be NSFW)

Submitter comments: This is what happens when you have “personnel” design your web site using FrontPage with animated Gifs. I also enjoy how there’s a button to get to the menu, which is a page by itself.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Making a cop site the Daily Sucker is like shooting fish in a barrel. (Hmm. Interesting choice of words.) I’d rather have them defending me that designing for me, but they should at least look at a few other web sites before they design their own.

There is also this scary noise when you go to a new page. Sounds like a bomb is getting ready to go off.

Crawford Co. Sheriff’s Office Web Site

Submitter comments: If you dare, enter the Seventh Circle of Hell, where gradients, bevels, glows, drop shadows, nonsensical and ultimately infuriating navigation and icky red tints reign…TOGETHER. (No! Don’t click the red button…)

My favorite feature of this site? You mean besides the design elements that lead me to believe the designer had to do this ON PURPOSE because it’s just so over-the-top with awfulness. While I love how the company’s name is misspelled on the header on the first page, my favorite part is how the quarter-circle spinny navigation thing immediately spins away if you click off the live area in the slightest, and then STAYS ON TOP OF EVERYHING when you go back to the homepage. Oh, and the use of external javascript and other atrocities make this site an accident waiting to happen (and oh, how we wish it would).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: God how I love this site. I just wish I could grab it all. There are so many things that are wrong with the site that it’s a catch-all for bad design. The site is almost its own Does My Web Site Suck? Checklist 1

Diversified Labeling Solutions

Submitter comments: Vincent, I just discovered the Save America Summit (SAS) web site. As someone who’s already not happy with how things are shaping up on the political scene, these guys seem to feel exactly the way I do.

However, I must take issue with their web site. Quite a few pages on it, including the front one, are wasting bandwidth by using images for text. What on earth was whoever created this site thinking? The very same effect can be accomplished by using text, the photos, and CSS for both style as well as positioning everything. Using images for text is utter nonsense, I don’t care what side of the political aisle one is on.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I have never seen such a convoluted web page in my life. The “real” url is for The Church in Crisis, although I can’t seem to find a link to SAS from their home page. The designer has done something very clever. He’s placed the same text inside a DIV tag that holds the image with the text. This supposedly would make the page indexable by the search engines, but you can’t grab the text or the images (the images are displayed by CSS). Of course, you can use a web site downloader program to grab everything. With a page rank of 0, I’m not sure how successful their tactics are. Take a look at one bit of their CSS:

.sly { /* Special */
display : none;
}

They’re making the text invisible and Google doesn’t like that. Oh, yeah. The site sucks for a lot of aesthetic reasons.

Save America Summit