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

Submitter comments: I was looking at high-end houses in an area where I’m thinking of moving and my agent sent me this URL. Talk about Mystery Meat Navigation. Until about the fifth house I didn’t realize there was a Panorama Tour or a Full Screen mode. Oh, and there’s hidden navigation at the top.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ironically, if you go to their regular home page, you don’t have these problems. Life would be so much easier if they just put a text menu on the left-side.

Obeo high-end tour (Choose High)

Submitter comments: This is for an actual airport parking company in Toronto. Possibly the ugliest site ever, this gem actually made my eyes bleed. It’s so confusing I don’t even know what services it’s offering anymore. There’s two navigation panels linking to subpages that each have a different templates.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Another example of “Where’s the Focus?” I dunno. It’s time to scrap the site and start all over.

Skyway Park

Submitter comments: I was searching for a continuing education class to take and found this scary site of of Georgia Perimeter College. As a person who has been designing web sites for a while now, the yellow links for the course listings were not only hard to read but also made me wince. I think a small piece of my creativity died inside.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If I had a dollar for every time I’ve said CONTRAST, I’d be a rich man. Doesn’t anybody in charge of the web site ever look at the end result? Of course, you just know they’ll fix it after finding out they made WPTS so I also have a screenshot

Georgia Perimeter College

Screenshot (in case they change it)

Submitter comments: Try this one on for size.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ouch, it’s too gaudy and way too long. Can we put any more on a web page? I especially love the subpages like What to Bring with its gaudy, unmoving background image. It’s a car wreck.

Sail New York City

Submitter comments: Vincent, I come to you today feeling incredibly guilty.  I’ve been a fan and patron of Poor David’s Pub, an exemplary live music venue in Dallas, Texas, for years.  Poor David’s has been a great place to catch local and touring bands for as long as I can remember, and I hate myself for speaking ill of the place.  However, I hadn’t had any reason to visit the pub’s Web site, and as you can tell, it’s straight out of 1997.  Animated musical notes, black background, and a page that scrolls on forever, and those are the least of its problems.

Now, I agree with you that most artistic sites should be exempt from winning a Daily Sucker.  However, when it’s a site for a business that promotes or displays artistry, wouldn’t it be better if the business was making sure that it wasn’t blinding its patrons with bad Web design?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: A lot of pubs still have this 1997 look and I don’t understand why. My favorite section on today’s Daily Sucker is Upcoming Shows, which features a set of animated, rainbow divider bars so out there that even gay bars won’t use them on their web sites. The same goes for the multicolored text.

I personally hate calendars that aren’t up-to-date and this site’s is certainly not current. I’ve noticed a lot of rock bands actually keep their calendars up-to-date (the Gin Blossoms come to mind).

Poor David’s Pub

Submitter comments: This is not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s really annoying. Plus, he thinks everyone that flies a kite should like the same kind of kite flying that he does. He has a grudge, and it’s ugly to read about. The front page isn’t the worst, again, but when you start drilling down, you quickly get into a rabbit hole of navigation.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Kites have been on my mind. I’ve been planning to go to the Washington State International Kite Festival over at Long Beach, but the weather has just sucked the last two days. Maybe today I’ll get to go.

I think the homepage makes every text error except using sideways text. We’ve got small text, multicolored text, centered and flush-left text, and it uses hidden text. There’s a large gap at the bottom of the home page. Click and drag your mouse and you’ll eventually see a screed about the “kite culture.” Who cares?

I’m in the minority about putting dates on web pages; however, if you go to the bottom of the Catalog/Store page, you’ll see the note “This page current as of Jul-6-2006.”

Seattle AirGear

Submitter comments: My friend, GlobeGuy, sent me two e-mails:

1. I haven’t sent you a with a terrible globe in a while.
2. Once again I find myself researching websites, and you know what that means. Here’s another site with not one but two ridiculous globes

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I can always count on GlobeGuy to come through.

I have to admit that the first site’s Flash globe is pretty and, as a former marketing weasel, I like it because it’s shiny. As an ADHD-boy, I like it because it causes me to lose focus of why I came to the site. Hmm. Why did I come to this site? Look at the nice puppy.

I think the second site has three globes (there’s a small one at the end of the top nav bar).

The only bigger cliche than a globe is a spider’s web. Thank God (or “Dog” if you’re dyslexic) you don’t see spider webs on anything but sites about spiders.

Avistar Communications (the first site)

SDL Tridon (the second site)

Submitter comments: I’ve just started using Crystal Reports 10 and had an issue pop up — a manager emailed me a report and asked for a change. When I ran the report to see what it did, CR popped up a message that a function couldn’t be used (UTCtoLocal) since the dll it needs isn’t installed. No big deal — go get the dll and install it, right? Wrong!

Apparently SAP bought Business Objects which owns CR. And the SAP support page now supports — sort of — Business Objects. They have a 2 MB PDF file on how to navigate their support web site. Hint: if you need a 2 MB PDF file to explain how to navigate your web site, something is wrong. Seriously wrong. And I’ve spent 45 minutes trying to find out where the dll is on their web site with no success so far.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: An interesting web design issue. The good news is the link is clearly marked that you’ll be downloading a 2Mb PDF file. The bad news is someone is laughing up their sleeve whenever he realizes customers have to read a 42-page document about navigating through their support black hole of death. Obviously, Business Objects wasn’t a contender for Best Application UIs of 2008 and it looks to me that SAP views customers as saps (see definition 4).

Business Objects Support Page (look for “How to Navigate Inside the SAP Support World: Detailed information for Customers & Partners”)

Submitter comments: I believe Google is starting to crawl Flash text, dunno how successful this will be. This site is just nasty with a splash page, Mystery Meat Navigation (kinda) and Flash everywhere.

The design is nice and I think it would work just as well with HTML and CSS.

What do you think?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think you’re right about everything except the Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN). It isn’t “kinda” MMN, it’s a full course of inedible crud.

I don’t think there’s much for a search engine to find. Right now, the site has a PageRank of zero. Besides the MMN, the other big problem is the lack of contrast on the menu (once you mouse over the square). Somehow, this site looks like a web template I’ve seen somewhere.

The site is nicely done and really would be better served by HTML and CSS.

galeforce consumer marketing

Submitter comments: Someone sent me this link. I’m sorry they did. There are so many banners and links, I didn’t know where to look first. It was easier to close the browser window.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This site belongs to a category I call “Over the Top.” An “Over the Top” web site is just like pornography — you know it when you see it. Accept Jesus, Forever Forgiven! is the perfect example.

“Over the Top” web sites generally deal with philosophy, religion, and politics, but they’re not mainstream. Rush Limbaugh’s site would fall into the “Over the Top” category, except he’s mainstream (even so his site is just a smidgen away from being a Daily Sucker).

While the Jeff Rense Program site is world’s away from the “Accept Jesus” site, it makes use of the stereotypical lime green text intermingled with yellow text. Some text is centered, while other text is flush left and, of course, the page goes on forever. The background for the subpages looks straight out of 1996.

I also don’t know whether to be frightened by or jealous of Mr. Rense’s hair.

Jeff Rense Program

Submitter comments: This website is not too bad, but the designers have not bothered reducing the dimensions of their images. As a result, some of the pages are a few MB in size!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I don’t know if I’d say it isn’t too bad. There are some serious contrast issues, especially with the text in the upper, right-hand corner of the pages.

The home page comes in at a svelte 785Kb. The “Table and Desk Lamps” page weighs in at almost 11Mb. Whatever the reason, this is just wrong.

Light My House

Submitter comments: Anyway, I was trying to find special software for my company and found this gem.

I tried to find the company’s contact information, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t even open their site properly. The site opens a pop-up window, loads a Flash interface for three minutes and does nothing even if I click the “click here” button on the map. On my second try, the site just freezes to the “loading” part.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The good news is that I was able to get into the site. The bad news is that I was able to get into the site.

Initially I thought “When does the page finish loading.” Then I realized I had to read the text on the triangle (Don’t Make Me Think!). Then I had to think whether I had Flash 8 or not (I have Flash 9).

A new window pops up and my eyes are drawn to what I know is Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN) — the flashing circles. I start mousing over them and, of course they’re MMN. My meaty choice was “Our Company” and I immediately looked for a way out. It was then I noticed what probably was a “real” menu system. I clicked the square marked “Actix” and got a real menu. Unfortunately, it led me to more Flash pages.

If you choose “Our Products,” you get Mystery Meat inside Mystery Meat. A message says, “Choose one of our products above.” The message should say, “Take a guess which one of these pictures is the product you never heard of that you might want if we actually told you something up front.” I moused over the first picture and received the useless message “Cellopt.” Yikes.

Actix

Submitter comments: Here’s another web site that sucks from a guy who thinks his site is the best photography site in the world. Enjoy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If this is the best photography site on the web, then this web site is the best looking web site in the world. (Trust me, it’s not even remotely close). The site is a classic example of Mistake #5 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.“

Wedding Photographer Toronto

Submitter comments: Stumbled upon this site while looking to get my water heater serviced.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This page proves why Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN) is evil. It’s OK for a music or movie site, band, web designer, artist, or actor to use Mystery Meat Navigation because their audience expects it. They expect it because it’s cutting edge. Unfortunately, MMN makes web sites difficult to use.

The real problem with MMN is it’s very seductive — it looks cool and it’s used on a lot of sites which win design awards. Because there’s no long strings of text, MMN makes the page look “cleaner” because there’s more white space.

You know the web design world has gone over the edge when a plumbing web site uses MMN. A plumbing web site!

Master’s Plumber Network — Flat Rate Pricing System

Another great Seth Godin post — you are reading his blog aren’t you?

The trap: Use all your money to build a fancy website and leave no money or patience for the hundred revisions you’ll need to do.

The trap: read the tech blogs and fall in love with the bleeding-edge hip sites and lose focus on the long-term players that deliver real value.

Definitely not a Daily Sucker.

The secret of the web

Submitter comments: Right now I’m shopping around for a way to take a composite video signal and send it wirelessly. I came across EmbedRF while shopping around, which seemed to be a good candidate for what I needed. It sends analog data wirelessly, which is just about what I needed. I was really considering buying it… but then I found their website.

I just don’t get how hardware company’s websites can be so crappy. I mean, you know enough to make fairly useful hardware, but you don’t know enough to make a good website (or at least HIRE someone to do it. not that hard).

Let’s start out small. In the header of the page, there’s a marquee. Just slap that thing on the logo and make it a subtitle. I believe this page was checked using either IE6 or IE7. The home page looks like it’s aligned better on IE than Firefox.

This website is pretty ugly. But what makes it even uglier is the inconsistency of each page. And, one of their main links is to a pdf (which takes forever for adobe to render, by the way).

But, by far, what makes this website HORRIBLE is the web page developer’s absolute refusal to create thumbnails (as soon as I loaded this page and saw the images slowly being drawn I knew right away to show you). For example, take the 85×85 picture of whatever that thing is (the link for it is “PSA2701T”). Seems a bit… blocky, doesn’t it? every good web developer should know what that means. Either the developer sized down a large image in the browser, or someone needs a better image scaling algorithm.

The image is really 1047 x 1047 pixels — and that’s not even the worst one. The “Pico USB PenScope” was 2764px x 2056px (scaled in the browser to 114px x 85px). It’s 1.5Mb and I… I’m just at a loss for words as to why anyone would think that this is a good idea (especially when you’re dealing with tech-savvy users who might be viewing this page from their phone).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Last Thursday I gave Father Flanders’ Sermon on Sinful Shrinking. It’s time I give it again.

Just because Jesus miraculously turned water into wine doesn’t mean he can miraculously turn your 1.5Mb, 2764- x 20566-pixel image into a 75Kb image just because you changed the WIDTH= and HEIGHT= attributes to WIDTH=”114″ and HEIGHT=”85.” It doesn’t work like that. Besides, Jesus has much better things to do.

Actually, there are thumbnail-type images but, as the submitter states, there are some images that are “shrunk to fit.” The homepage weighs in at a lofty 6Mb. I usually say that nobody will wait 25.3 seconds (which is what it took to load) to see a 6Mb page unless there are pictures of naked and/or dead bodies. Well, these pictures might be considered techy-porn and worth waiting to see. I don’t see much variance between pages.

I’ve don’t recall seeing two logos before. My major complaint is the lack of contrast between the menu text and the background. If there’s any text you need to be able to read, it’s menu text.

Saelig Company USA

Submitter comments: Submitted as a real sucker, especially given the nature of the site. This site is dependent on JavaScript to work and the designer’s method to resize an image is to change the HEIGHT= and WIDTH= attributes. The Mossy Creek School page is a good example where an 8.5MB, 3504×2336 image is shrunk down to 238×159 with HTML.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It is now time for Father Flanders’ Sermon on Sinful Shrinking:

Just because Jesus miraculously turned water into wine doesn’t mean he can miraculously turn your 8.5Mb, 3504- x 2336-pixel image into a 75Kb image just because you changed the WIDTH= and HEIGHT= attributes to WIDTH=”238″ and HEIGHT=”159.” It doesn’t work like that. Besides, Jesus has much better things to do.

The code for this site is among the most jumbled I’ve seen. Whatever happened to good ol’ HTML? The text-to-code ratio of the home page is something like 7% text. As someone whose site is already over-the-edge with Javascript (and going to get worse), I realize that Javascript is the true enemy of fast-loading web pages.

Oh. You just have to love the names of the images like 52B528EC46EE4F2AA6667245E79B7587.jpg. Yeah, that’s descriptive.

Houston County Schools

Submitter’s comments: My favorite part, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the
page, is this little nugget:

2/3 of this page moved to
archives_2008.htm
– makes the Front Page load faster!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I don’t have the slightest idea what this page is really about. It looks like it’s a site against nuclear energy, but I could be wrong. All I have to say to whatever organization or person is creating this site is “Take your Adderall and start focusing.” Why anyone thinks a 576Kb page is OK puzzles me.

Vermont Yankee, evacuation plans, & more

Vincent’s apology: Tuesday’s second sucker had the wrong link. Interestingly, it wasn’t the previous day’s sucker but a site that certainly doesn’t suck. To make matters worse, I was gone all day so I didn’t “catch” the mistake. The entry has the right URL, but I’m repeating it here.

Submitter comments: I was hoping to find some useful info here, but the way they have this laid out it could very well take days.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It might even take weeks. Anytime you have a 4.81Mb web page, you know your site has problems. It would take world class skills to find what you were looking for on this site and I certainly don’t have them. I barely know where the wiper fluid container is in my car.

This site celebrates the return of the beveled graphic.

4L60-E

Submitter comments: I was hoping to find some useful info here, but the way they have this laid out it could very well take days.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It might even take weeks. Anytime you have a 4.81Mb web page, you know your site has problems. It would take world class skills to find what you were looking for on this site and I certainly don’t have them. I barely know where the wiper fluid container is in my car.

This site celebrates the return of the beveled graphic.

4L60-E

Submitter comments: I found another site for you. The worst thing about this site is not so much the terrible web design, but the fact that you can’t figure out what these guys do or why they should be famous enough for you to want to buy their “merch” to support the breast milk foundation.

Be sure to check out their embedded YouTube videos. It’s like they tried to draw inspiration for their site by studying the worst MySpace pages

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Sigh. KidsToday. They think they’ve invented everything. Back in the mid 1990′s my co-worker and friend Jim Murkland (on the right) and I were going to put up a web site called “Turk and Jurk” (guess which one of us was “Jurk”). The site was going to be about our rambles through beautiful downtown Bakersfield, California. At least we had a concept.

Today’s sucker seems to be concept-free. Who are these people and why should I care? Are these guys Turk and Jurk’s idiot bastard sons?

KeelandFlo.com

To celebrate the beginning of WebPagesThatSuck’s 13th year I thought I’d go through my vault of bad web design and show you some of the classics.

Sadly, a lot of the mistakes you’ll see are still being made 13 years later. Fortunately, most of the companies I’ll feature learned the errors of their way and fixed their sites. They’re hoping and praying that these mistakes will remain buried because they don’t show up in Archive.org.

My first example is from 1998 and the company in question is Janus — “a global investment manager offering institutional and intermediary clients and individual investors complementary asset management disciplines including growth and risk-managed strategies.” Really? You’d never know it by looking at their site.

Here’s the YouTube video (and here are more of my videos at YouTube)

A nicer and higher resolution version at WebPagesThatSuck.TV

Submitter comments: The home page for zumba.com is bad enough, but then I went to find a Zumba class near me, and the moving graphic was so *#@% distracting I could hardly type my zip code.

What were they THINKING?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What were they thinking? They were thinking, to quote Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head, “Damn, we’re smooth.”

The home page is your stereotypical Web 2.0 design. For some reason, my speakers are set to high. This is not a good idea with this site.

I’m using the “Find a Class” as an example of how one silly mistake ruins what would normally be a decent page (OK, there are contrast issues with the text and background, but you get my point.

Zumba — Find a class