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

Submitter comments: Clean is most certainly happy for your behind, but it is not happy for your website! Apart from the multitude of butts that seem to take forever to load and the navigational (faces?) buttons, I would have to say that this site’s biggest crime is not having any words.

That means if you’re looking at this site at work, the sound has to be muted and that means that this site doesn’t actually tell me anything unless I go clicking around. By that time I’m too bored to progress further. By the way, this is the line of toilets that Google outfits their offices with.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: (Note to self: abstain from any obvious and crude references). Obviously, this site is NSFW.

I find the TITLE tag amusing — Toto | Washlet – Flash Player Installation. Personally, I don’t understand the need for Mystery Meat Navigation when regular navigation would work just fine. (Whew! I made it without saying anything crude and rude — mostly because I didn’t say much.)

Toto | Washlet (MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR WORK)

Submitter comments: Good tools, really sucky web site.

I went to the Estwing tool site to look up warranty information. Since I block Flash I was greeted by “The Estwing Web site requires the FREE Flash player. Please download Flash now.”

Assuming that I had found a sucker I unblocked the site.

Your eyes are drawn to the hammers at the bottom of the page. Not true mystery meat navigation because, for the most part, the users of the site should be counted on to be able to ID the tools. At the very least it’s overly cute navigation and a totally pointless effect for the sake of cool.

Put your cursor over the Products drop down menu. Isn’t that cute, too? I am assuming someone thought the bounce was “hammerish.”

Select a hammer, any hammer. Instead of a picture of a hammer with its characteristics you get another Flash movie. Since you cannot move the hammer around to see it at different angles, this seems unusually pointless even for a Flash site. Note those circles with the + mark in them. You are instructed to mouse over (them) for more information. Navigation instructions are always a sure sign of web design “quality.” You don’t need Flash because there is plenty of space to put text info on the page.

Oh, note the animated flag! Not a gif! An animated Flash flag.

It would not be difficult to make this purely informational site look nice and be useful without using any Flash. Using Flash for everything on this sort of site is complete nonsense.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I found it difficult to select a hammer. Unless I was really careful and moved my mouse just right, I couldn’t select the hammer I wanted information about. It’s even worse after you get the correct hammer. Try to select another hammer and the chase is on.

I really hate to say this, but the Flash flag doesn’t bother me because it’s promoting “Made in the USA.” What I object to is throwing a flag up just to have a flag. A lot of Midwest industrial company web sites needlessly feature flags. I’ve never heard of an industrial company — or any company that manufactures a real product — that’s unpatriotic. Have you?

Estwing

Submitter comments: I was doing some research on police web sites and came across a link on Google, “The Seekonk Police Department web site sucks #27. … It turns out I used this site as an example of bad web design back in October 2000. Guess what? …”

Since I have looked at some of the sites listed on your website in the past I couldn’t help but take a peek. The Seekonk Police website is bad but I may have one for you that is even worse. Check this out from Douglas County Missouri.

P.S. Try to right click on some text.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Interestingly, my daughter and I were watching the latest Reno 911 DVD tonight (background on the show) and it occurred to me that today’s Daily Sucker is just the type of site that this mock police department would have up and running.

Today’s sucker uses every cop cliche I’ve ever seen (including the theme from Bad Boys). The animated bullets being “fired” on the home page are not the kind of message you want to see on your local police department’s web site. This tacky technique reminded me of one of the bonus features on the DVD — Cop Psychology Inside the Minds of Reno’s Deputies.

The different officers were interviewed by a psychologist/psychiatrist and the question that was asked of everyone was “Under what circumstances do you feel deadly force is justified?” The answers are hilarious. I’ve provided a link to one of them and it’s TOTALLY NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK (or for those folks who have a sophisticated sense of humor or are easily offended).

Just as you wouldn’t want your local cops to spout the same nonsense as Lt. Dangle about deadly force, you don’t want your local police web site to use animated bullets.

Today’s sucker is how cop sites used to look like in the old days. The problem is “these are the new days” and this site proves that police brutality doesn’t always involve a billy club.

Douglas County Sheriff’s Department

Submitter comments: Here is a bad site I recently came across — New Belgium Brewing, makers of one of my favorite beers, “Fat Tire.”

It’s not just the Mystery Meat Navigation. The navigation keeps going and going. Use your arrow keys to “ride” endlessly past moving pictures, exposing an ever growing amount of where do I click? and what does this picture do? crap.

The one thing they have going for them is the “Low Bandwidth” version is more familiar, but not really easy to use. Where the hell is the contact us link? I guess they have become tired of hearing how bad their Flash site sucks.

Thanks for all you have done.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There’s a part of me that says, “The site is supposed to look stupid” and there’s a part of me that says, “The phrase ‘supposed to’ is just an excuse.”

Even when you accidentally go to a page with content, you can’t read it because of the lack of contrast between the small text and the background. Sheesh. It’s just an overwraught Flashturbation fantasy.

I love the fact that if you click the link below, you bypass the site’s age check mechanism. Of course, underage visitors can just as easily claim to be 55 years old.

New Belgium Brewery – Flash Site

I’m not the only person who recognizes that architects have problems with their web sites. treehugger takes architects to task over their web sites. I’m going to add these suckers to my Bad Architects Sites.

Here are some more articles about bad architectural web sites: bd and the Guardian.

I just got up from a cough-syrup-induced coma (I’ve got bronchitis) and realized that today marks the beginning of the 13th year of WPTS.

I’m reminded of what some famous musician (Roger McGuinn of the Byrds?) said: “Make sure you like the songs you record because you might have to sing them every night for the next 40 years.”

Back in 1996 I thought this site would be up for a couple of weeks since it was an adjunct to my HTML class. I wanted to show bad web design examples and I wanted to come up with an edgy domain name. The rest is history.

In the beginning I received a lot of complaints about the site’s name. Thanks to Bill Clinton, Beavis and Butt-Head, and American culture, I can’t remember the last time anyone found the name objectionable.

It’s been an interesting ride. Thanks.

I have bronchitis (I’ve had it for the last three days). It’s hard to imagine, but here in SW Washington (NW Oregon), the temperature hasn’t hit 70.

Submitter comments: How about navigation that jumps away from your cursor? (Choose the Flash site.)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Very strange, but since WPTS is three days away from being on our 13th year of sucking, I’m used to strange.

The multiple Flash pages take forever to load. Click on the UMF5 logo in the top-right corner and you’re not taken to the home page, but it makes the page change colors. I have no idea what the ice cream bar symbols represent, but you can’t click on them. Yes, the links do move away from your cursor unless you move quickly. The “Tickets” link seems to be the most troublesome. Oh, and once you click, there’s no logical home button. There’s a “Close” button, which you would think would close the window. Nope. That’s the “Home” button.

UMF5

Submitter comments: You’d think they would have learned to avoid Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN) by now.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yes, you would think they would know better. It’s bad enough we have MMN, but we also have small text and a lack of contrast between the menu text and the background. The menu is really difficult to read.

They also created one of the most pretentious slide shows I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of pretentiousness in my time. After all, I graduated from a liberal arts college. I know pretentious.

WorldBlu

I’ve just gone through the first six months of Daily Suckers — trust me, it will make you ill — and I’ve come up with 47 of the worst:

Worst Web Sites of 2008: Contenders 1-10

Worst Web Sites of 2008: Contenders 11-20

Worst Web Sites of 2008: the rest of the contenders

Enjoy <grin>

Submitter comments: I’m looking for a podiatrist and saw this ad in the phone book. Besides the typos (hte?), the multicolored buttons just scare me! If you scroll down, there are also some “disappearing” and “reappearing” names (odd!), and the swirly rainbow bars create hallucinations if you stare at them long enough. Good thing I’m not looking for an ophthalmologist, huh?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Another unfortunate example of someone providing a necessary service who has an unnecessary website. It’s pretty obvious the site was created with one of those horrid Microsoft Themes. The site is stupendously bad. It takes a long time to understand the navigation, the site uses multicolored and multi-font text, different text sizes, and the use of those animated GIFs is offensive.

Home Page for Dr. Zapf

Submitter comments: None.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Sorry for not posting suckers for the last few days, but I threw my back out. I’m sure 90% of you completely understand my predicament.

I was going through my log files when I noticed a lot of visits from a site I’d never seen before — EEE shop. I went there and discovered they were using the same web template I’m using (except I give credit in the footer). They even used the same stylesheet, which is fine except there are references to graphics from this site (WPTS).

I have an htaccess file that blocks downloading graphics and using them on another site. Since the files don’t download, I don’t lose bandwidth. I decided to be clever and put in a replacement image when someone tries to download my graphics. It’s one simple line added to .htaccess

RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png|mp3|mpg|avi|mov|swf)$ /images/wpts-rip.jpe [L]

Here’s the replacement image:

Their site’s been this way for a couple of days. They probably haven’t noticed because they’re loading the site from cache <grin> and they’re seeing the old site.

If you want to block people using your bandwidth, this article explains how.

OF COURSE, THEY FIXED IT. YOU CAN SEE HOW SIMILAR OUR SITES ARE. THANK GOODNESS FOR WEB TEMPLATES.

EEE Shop

Submitter comments: I hope you don’t suffer from epilepsy.

I think I’ve found a new criterion for your Checklist: Health and Safety or, ‘we don’t care if you suffer from epilepsy.’

This grotesque monster takes ages to load but, when it does , you get the most intense storm of flashing images of this company’s projects. It’s utterly pointless to have these rapid animated gifs, since this company apparently specialises in sound, not pictures; I didn’t bother going past the front page… well to tell the truth, after looking at the front page, I woke up five hours later and the Sun had set.

If you have already seen this site, I apologise for thrusting it back into your forebrain.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, I’ve never seen this site before, but I’ll still accept your apology. It’s hard to believe this organization is involved in sound design and music. I really can’t say more because my brain is frozen.

Freefarm, Hello

Submitter comments: Dear God. Where to begin. Horrible flash animations. Frames. Cloaked text.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There’s one thing about this chiropractic practice I like. It’s located on Flanders St.

What I don’t like is the FlashSplash page and the fact that the designer wasn’t clever enough to set a cookie so I don’t have to view the intro each time I go back.

This site makes an important mistake, which you don’t see very often — poor choice of link name. One of their links is called, “Who Would Dare!” and that doesn’t tell me squat. Link names embedded in text should be descriptive and accurately describe where they lead such as: Scary picture of an almost naked Vincent Flanders. Not Click Here. (May be NSFW. It’s certainly not for the squeamish.)

Shephard Clinic

Submitter comments: On the internet, Antigua: The Land of Fairies Wizards and Heroes is something of an infamously bad book. I suppose it’s not surprising it has a bad web site, but it is terrible. Really, what are those bouncing things? Make them stop!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I wish I could make them stop. I really do.

We’ve got images used as text, horizontal scrolling, ugly colors, and a link to the home page on the home page.

Antigua: Volume 1

Submitter comments: OK, I actually hesitated to submit this site because I am an aspiring banjo player and have actually purchased instructional materials from this site. Although the content of the materials is top notch, the web site, well, just plain sucks.

Navigation is a mess with redundant links all over the place. You feel like you’re always lost. Not to mention the clutter, the image links, the colors, the animated gifs, the centered text… The list could go on and on!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Possibly true, but I think your list is a great start. The Flash logo is hard to read and it’s a stupid implementation of Flash. I’m not sure why they have a Splash Page that resembles the “real” home page.

I’m going to trust the submitter’s comments that the instructional materials are top notch. I’m not a musician, so I can’t tell, but it upsets me that high quality material is presented like some cheap pr()n site from 1996.

BanjoTeacher.com

Submitter comments: None.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I went to the The Hard Rock Memorabilia page because Microsoft said its Silverlight 2 software had an exciting feature called DeepZoom:

This capability allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions.

OK. I go to the Hard Rock page and I’m greeted with the following message (I’m just showing the important part of the page) on the last line:

I’m not using a Mac and the Hard Rock should be smart enough to know this.

Oh. I mistakenly thought that all the Mystery Meat on the page belonged to the feature artists named on the left side. Wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no way to find out if your favorite artist is featured. That’s what really sucks.

The Hard Rock Memorabilia page (Requires Microsoft Silverlight)

Submitter comments: This web page sucks in the classic form of sucking. No overuse of Javascript, no using Flash where plain HTML would do. It’s just downright bad.

It has a bright blue background with red, white, blue, and black text. Note that some of that black text has a yellow background. This web page overuses contrast, except for the blue text (that you can find if you look really hard) randomly thrown in with text.

To make sure you don’t lust over an image of a box of yodels, they’ve gone ahead and disabled right click for you. The funny thing is that the script to disable right click doesn’t even work (when you use Firefox). The right click menu shows up after you press “OK.”

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This charmer uses 370 <FONT> tags. Yes, 370! The page has more <META> tags than almost any other site I’ve seen, but they don’t have a DOCTYPE. This is crazy. Oh, the page goes on forever.

Drakes Cakes

Submitter comments: Here’s another sucker from Down Under. We build ‘em good down here!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: You sure do build them good. Unfortunately, this site isn’t one of them <grin>. It’s nice to see some old-style mistakes like “Welcome to” and “Please Change Your Screen Resolution.” The tacky backgrounds are a nice touch, as are the frames.

Weatherfoil Pty Ltd

I entered the following into Amazon’s search box: How Can I Talk If My Lips Won’t Move. Amazon said:

Your search “How Can I Talk If My Lips Won’t Move: ” did not match any products.

The only mistake I made consisted of one letter — Don’t instead of Won’t. I’m sorry, but that’s just unacceptable. I tried the same search at Barnes & Noble and Powell’s, but they couldn’t find the book. Oh, Borders gets it right. Why did I search for the title? I couldn’t remember the author’s name: Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay.

BTW, it’s a great book about what it’s like to be autistic.

Submitter comments: Flash-based site, Wait-For-It homepage intro, Mystery Meat (birds count as meat, right?), annoying sound effects, contrast issues, pop-
up windows (in the “press” section”. Did I miss anything?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Not a whole lot. The lack of contrast is what drives me crazy. On the other hand there’s some “good” news on the Flash front. Here’s another e-mail I received:

I am a regular visitor to your site and just came across an article you might be interested in: Once Nearly Invisible To Search Engines, Flash Files Can Now Be Found And Indexed.

Of course I’m sure this will do nothing to stop the wide spread suckiness of web design in general, but it’s a step forward at least.

You’re right, of course. The key part of the article is:

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

You just know that spammers are out there trying to figure out how they can game the system. It will be easier to game because it will be harder to figure out if someone is spamming because all the evil is hiding inside of a Flash file. You won’t be able to look at a Flash page and figure out what’s going on in the same way you can look at an HTML file.

Thomas Paul