The Daily Sucker

Submitter comments: I always enjoy dropping by your site now and again and have been for at least the past decade or so.

Now, this has gotta be the worst site I’ve ever seen, certainly the worst one in many years. Frankly, I don’t think I could make a site this bad if I set out to do so. I don’t know how they did but when I arrived at this site, I immediately thought of you.

The home page…well, what can I say. There’s virtually nothing meaningful on it. Yet, with all of its images (and a .wav file) the page is over 1MB! The HTML itself weighs in at a staggering 512KB. There seems to be far more text contained in the meta tags than displayed on the page.

Of course, like any worst-of-the-worst website, this one’s complete with all the bells and whistles. An ‘Install Missing Plugin’ pop-up, a ‘best viewed with this browser’ statement, an embedded welcome sound file, MARQUEE, a plethora of text images, javascript, and so much more. You just gotta visit.

Oh, if you’re thinking of ‘borrowing’ some of the images from that site, I should warn you that they’ve disabled the right click.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I guess I should be flattered when people say they see a horrible looking website and think of me. Personally, the Tom Cruise part of me can’t imagine why someone would make that statement.

When I looked at the site I couldn’t believe it was a 1Mb page — especially the part about the HTML eating up 512Kb. Then I checked it with the Web Page Analyzer and it was true. What caused it? Stuffed keywords? Stuffed META tags? Nope. It’s the world’s biggest MARQUEE tag — which you can’t even see because it’s so far down the page.

Oh. As you can imagine, there isn’t any graphic worth stealing.

Property Listings on the Net

Submitter comments: You’d think that IKEA would know better than to use Mystery Meat
Navigation (and music, for that matter).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Mystery Meat Navigation is most often tied to the misuse of Flash and today’s example is no exception. Ironically, Ikea is one of the few web sites that uses Flash correctly. By “The correct use of Flash,” I’m talking about using it to show you how to put together one of their products.

Yes, it’s cute. Very cute. For about 60 seconds. Even though you can turn the music off, just let it play for about 30 seconds and you’ll be begging for weasels to rip your flesh.

IKEA Design Stories

Submitter comments: In the non-profit category consider this one! This is the most impossible university to navigate! It’s style code is CFS — Can’t Find Sxxt!

OMG…Nothing is consistent..it’s a WRECK and don’t miss the College of Math and Science!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I always say it, so here I go again: It’s more difficult to designing a college/university web site than any other type of website. There is always an incredible amount of content that has to be organized into meaningful categories and relationships PLUS you have incredible internal political pressure about who gets their spot on the home page. The home page space problem is greater on today’s sucker because they’re using a fixed width — and it’s a small fixed width.

Once of the most important concepts in web design is “expectations.” Visitors expect to be able to find certain types of information and they expect to find this information in specific locations. For example, visitors expect to find the university’s logo at the top, left corner of the page — and there it is. They expect to find other types of information in multiple places — “Departments” or “Admissions” — and they will be upset when they don’t find the information.

Because the person suggesting today’s site said to check out the College of Math and Science, I went looking for a link that said, “Departments” or “Schools.” Logically, I looked at the navigation menu on the left. Nothing there (I hate the fact that the tooltip obscures some of the menu items). Frankly, I couldn’t believe it.

OK, let’s try the search box. I entered “College of Math and Science” and ended up with the following. Oops. Actually, if I scroll down and find the following text, “For more information, please visit  Programs of Study,” and click the link I’ll find the listing for departments.

I accidentally discovered “Departments” at the top of the page. Speaking of the top of the page, there’s a big, black, empty space that would be perfect for a search form. Hmm. When I finally got to the College of Math and Science, I was greeted by black text on a dark blue background.

The Department of Math and Statistics is a gem. We’ve got frames, an ugly background, and a link to the Home page which is a link to the current page. It’s not a link to what I call the “Home Home” page.

Kennesaw State University

Submitter comments: (No comments, just the URL).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This site has me totally confused. Why? Because the site is messed up in every current browser. If you don’t believe me, take a look at BrowserCam’s screen captures. I only checked it in 51 browser / operating system combinations. Maybe I should have used everything available, like Netscape 4.78.

Hasn’t anyone involved in the company looked at the site? This isn’t logical.

Check out the source code. Amazing.

Piano Logic

Submitter comments: Checking out the top ten blogs on Myspace today, I found that they all sucked.

Here’s #1: Possibly NSWF. I didn’t really examine it for content, just to see how badly it sucked.

Here’s #10: NSWF.

The ones in between are no different in kind.

Oh, here’s another one. There’s no globe, just an ugly web page. This isn’t an entire website that sucks, but it certainly (tautologically) qualifies as a web page, and it certainly sucks (no matter what you think of the contents, which I didn’t have the patience to read, because the page sucked so much): Rejection of Pascal’s Wager.

P.S. Why am I visiting Myspace at all? I’m trying to make sense of the phenomenon of these social networking sites.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The email came from GlobeGuy, one of my favorite contributors. Normally, I wouldn’t consider using Myspace since these are personal web pages, but there is something interesting at work here. I just signed up for a Myspace page and the default template, Blue Rounded, is certainly OK. Several other templates are OK, too. The design problems start when people start being “creative.”

Unfortunately, our educational system doesn’t place a high value on aesthetics and so we get results like those shown above.

Oh, GlobeGuy. Try Mashable for social networking news and when you understand why people are so in love with these sites, let me know.

Submitter comments: I can’t possibly list everything wrong with this site. Too many things are just wrong:

• A Flash intro that you can’t see because of the poor contrast
• On top of the Flash intro, a popup advertising their own site (?!)
• Then another Flash intro with poor contrast
• All links from the main site open in new windows
• Every “part” of the site uses a different style

I hope you enjoy this winner of a web site. It’s actually more like a collection of subdomains somehow linked together.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The whole introduction section sucks. Something’s going by me too fast too see and understand. You know how much I love it when you have to tell people how the navigation works.

Because of the dark colors — black text on dark red background — I didn’t even see the Post-It navigation on the side. Oh, eventually the navigation ends up at the top of the page — and sideways. Charming.

Once I understood how the site worked, it wasn’t as annoying. On the other hand, I got plenty pissed when I found out I could only book a room, but not get any information about the room or the facility. C’mon. Is anyone gonna book a room based on a thumbnail-sized picture and a few words?

When you get to the last page, there’s a NEXT button. Uh.

The site also needs a new name. I thought it was going to be about a program that got jobs for the unemployed.

Pocono Mountains Work Relief

Submitter comments: Guy Kawasaki just twittered this site — it’s a great example of Mystery Meat Navigation. Serious eye candy, but how I hate it. Beautiful images of amazing work and they hide them in tiny thumbnails in little scrolling areas on the page. Sheesh.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Sigh. Guy Kawasaki is a very successful person who is an idiot when it comes to knowing what a web site should look like. I’m sure the cakes are fantastic, but the site sucks worse than my sophomore year in college’s grades. (It was 1968 and that was NOT the year to have a negative grade point average).

I’m working on an article where Flash is one of the featured topics. For the moment, here’s probably the best take on Flash — Hugh Macleod’s excellent cartoon about people who use Flash (and people like Kawasaki who like Flash) — NSFW.

Mike’s Amazing Cakes