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.

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