The Daily Sucker

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