Web Pages That Suck - learn good web design by looking at bad web design

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

Submitter comments: Why are so many evangelical web sites not only brutal on the browsers, and on
the eyes, but also designed by the preachers themselves? These sites crashed my browser a couple of times.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I suspect people get confused by the concepts of “can” and “should.” Just because you can do something (create your own web site, add 1Mb worth of graphics, or use Flash navigation doesn’t mean you should.

Normally, I don’t use two web sites from the same organization, but there’s always a first time.

Basically, everything is wrong with both of the sites. On the Patricia Turner site, I’d like to point out the TITLE tag is “Home,” which isn’t going to help the search engines. My friend, GlobeGuy, will enjoy the smallish globe that’s toward the end of the home page.

The Miracles page is totally bizarre. Very strange animated GIFs.

The home page for Temple Compassion scared the living bejezus out of me. It’s just frightening.

Patricia Turner 
Temple Compassion

Submitter comments: This page’s suckiness is all about the buttons. This site is like a game of which buttons work, which ones don’t? As you surf through the site the buttons move around, now they work, wait… now they don’t. Some buttons are offered on some pages, then not on others – it is all quite a mystery…

A worthwhile non-profit that needs a web site that the public can use, not be abused by!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s pretty impressive — in a negative way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many dead buttons on a site that

1. isn’t a mock up
2. under construction
3. is for a real organization

This is much worse than Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN). With the MMN I’ve seen, there are real links — once you find them. This site is using Dead Meat Navigation.

Northeast Nebraska RC&D

Submitter comments: This page is so freaking terrible. It plays one of three education-oriented country-music songs on start-up with no way of stopping them and that change depending on the day of the week (how clever!).

It’s ugly, has randomly placed animated GIFs and images for buttons. Back to the main page – in case my description is difficult to follow), the links across the top work randomly depending on what page you’re on. The Library page is also worth staring at in disbelief. For some reason it has a it-counter-laden splash page, for which someone actually took design credit and on which the TITLE tag actually reads, “This is my first web page.” I believe it.

If you click around the library page, you find all sorts of other, creative titles like, “This Links is the Index Page,” and “SECTION 1 Title 1 Title 2 Title 3.”

BTW, I just had to know who performed those songs on the home page. It’s Garre LaGrone, a motivational speaker and singer. I’m sure his music is copyrighted, and I doubt the school actually got permission to play it. I think I smell a law suit.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think it’s interesting that two of the home page’s major links just don’t work — Library and Calendar. The “Parents” link leads to a page that’s under construction. I got to the Library page from the Administration page. There’s a link at the bottom called “Back” and if you click it, you get a 404 error.

I also like the fact that the counter on the library page says 000001 — no matter how many times you visit.

Lopez High School

Submitter comments: One of the worst sites I have ever seen…The best example of why this page sucks is the “cheeky button” feature on the top right of the page. Give it a click and see what happens…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Wow! Clicking on the “cheeky button” is a waste of time and might be insulting to certain people.

The color scheme is terrible, but what’s worse is the contrast between the text and background sucks. Here’s what AccessColor says:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 13.41% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 73.18% of the total the text.

Your visitors need to be able to read your text.

Catalyst Retail Security Tags

Submitter comments: I really couldn’t believe the designers of The University of Alabama in Huntsville had the nerve to use this design after the same design was featured on WPTS with Brown University.

No research, obviously. To make matters worse, UAH tells you why this new design is so much better, while explaining how to use the navigation.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I spent a long, long time trying to come up with an opening sentence for this review:

If I had cojones as big as the people who borrowed Brown’s horrible web site design, I’d…
If I had as much chutzpah as the people who borrowed Brown’s horrible web site design, I’d…

I don’t know what to say other than take a look at Brown University’s web site and then take a look at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Back in 2006, I said Brown University was the year’s 10th Worst Web Site. We certainly have a Top 10 entry for 2008. If you’re going to borrow a design, at least borrow something that wasn’t featured on Web Pages That Suck.

University of Alabama in Huntsville

Submitter comments: This is seriously bad.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, that’s the 4 word version of my review.

We really don’t need the FlashSplash page. The “real” home page has, for some reason known but to God, sideways navigation. Fortunately, when you mouse over a link, the new menu isn’t sideways. When I clicked on the “Travel Flash” button, I was taken to a subpage that didn’t have a link to the home page.

On the Explore and Learn page, there are two links at the bottom-left of the page that are actually PDF files. Unmarked PDF files. For some strange reason, the home page link is on the right-hand side of the top logo. Oh, and we have contrast issues.

It’s very strange.

Land Between the Lakes