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

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