Sites featured in articles like Worst Websites of 2010 often are redesigned, which explains why some sites mentioned in my articles don't match their current look. The Daily Sucker features current examples of bad web design which haven't been fixed (yet).
If you see a site that you think sucks, email the URL to me. No personal pages (personal pages are supposed to reflect the individual's personality and artistic freedom) or web site designers (it would look like a conflict of interest), or others of their ilk.
Submitter’s comments: Don’t know whether or not this site has been covered but I was searching through google, don’t ask me what, and I stumbled upon this site and my eyes bled. Submitted for your approval: Cow Dance Wear
Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s Thanksgiving here in the United States, which means we eat turkey. Speaking of turkeys, today’s site is certainly a turkey. Hopefully, you won’t get ill.
I’m willing to bet that everyone but the designer can see all the mistakes.
Submitter’s comments: I think that chiropractic websites must attract horrible design:
Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think you’re right. Obviously, this site was designed on a 640×480 monitor. If you look at it on anything larger, the content runs over the border as illustrated by these BrowserCam screen captures. There are four screen captures of the first screen at different resolutions and four captures after the PAGE DOWN key was hit. See for yourself.
Submitter’s comments: This thing is horrible — and they PAID for it!!!
Vincent Flanders’ comments: You have to love the way text is arranged on the Office Hours page and the fact there’s no link to the home page. Yes, it’s “under construction,” but still. The image of the spinal cord on the left freaks me out because it looks like a poisonous snake is going up and down the spine. There’s no reason for the animated spine on the right side and I don’t have to tell you (but I have to tell them) that cube in the middle sucks worse than a $20 vacuum cleaner.
Frames suck, but they suck even more when the links open in a new window (the few I tried). If you’re going to open new windows, you don’t need frames. The background in the left frame is ugly as are the buttons. There’s a delicious irony that the h2h page — yes, that’s the “helpful” title — has a GooglePageRank of 3, but the Home Page has a page rank of 0.
The list of mistakes goes on and on. Nuke it and start over.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Here’s an article about an incredibly sucky site from a major company. I think we’ve got another contender for Worst of 2008. The site is called BEA — The Beginning of Business. I think it should be called BEA — The Beginning of Bad Web Design.
Note to the author of the article: Nobody’s more surprised than I am that the site is still here. I didn’t think it would last thirteen weeks — much less thirteen years. On the other hand, I should have known because there’s a limited amount of good web design and an infinite amount of bad web design on the web.
Submitter comments: I went to this site to find information on some electronic components, and I found what I was looking for quickly. Their search tools work, and there is a refresing lack of complex scripts that crash my browser or otherwise waste time.
On the other hand, you can tell these people are in an industry that is utterly devoid of aesthetic sense. I wonder if Mr. T is getting paid for this?
Vincent Flanders’ comments: What a wonderful example for Friday — late Friday. OK, we have an abundance of color and a really stupid image. On the other hand, the submitter found what s/he was looking for — and found it quickly. Which is more important? I’m not sure if the site qualifies as a Daily Sucker, so I’ll leave it up to my readers to decide. There’s a poll after the link.
Submitter’s comments: Here’s another dose of advertising chaos.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’ll give them credit, somebody knows how to use Flash. Unfortunately, it’s an ADHD cesspool. I was a little surprised to hear a voice say “Feel free to touch it” and a little disconcerted to discover that the #11 search on Google (at that moment) was “brad pitt tattoos.”
It took me a bit to figure out where the important link was located. It took me to another Flash page, which was also strange, but it had information about how to get mobile broadband. My main reaction is “Why?”
Submitter’s comments: This page was bad, but they’ve made it worse. I like how (at least in Firefox) the heading text is halfway down the page over a bunch of pictures.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Although the home page looks better than most flea market web sites, there’s a subtle, yet major, problem. The home page blows up in Firefox as you can see with these screen captures from BrowserCam. These problems don’t show up in Internet Explorer 7.
The most important HTML tag — TITLE — is the search-engine-unfriendly “http://www.charltonflea.com/” It would be better if it were “Charleston Flea Market and Antiques.”
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Proof that you don’t have to speak English to create sucky web pages. It’s a mortal sin to use an image as your content. It’s a 5th ring of hell mortal sin to have a scrunched-up, unreadable image for your content.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: I was reading an entry in TechCrunch about a baby-naming site. I decided to take a look and here’s part of the message I received:
Submitter comments: Here’s a web site that sucks. Navigation: awful. Layout: awful. Colours: even more than awful.
Finding anything on there seems to be impossible!
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Definitely another contender for worse web site of 2008. Good golly, Miss Molly this sure is a mess. The only possible positive comment I can make is that the navigation in the left frame is basically alphabetical. (Is “basically” good enough? If I were single, would I want to date someone who is “basically” a woman?)
The most important HTML tag — TITLE — is the search-engine-hating “New Page 1.” They shouldn’t feel bad about this gaffe. There are only 5,310,000 other pages on the web with the same text.
Submitter comments: I was perusing your site and thought this might be a good one to add to your list…why?
Three links to the home page on the home page, all of which increase the counter…among other obvious things…
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, it’s obviously ugly and all the red links go to the home pages of the manufacturers. I don’t understand why they bother to have a web site.
Submitter comments: Here’s a site suggestion for you. It’s 100% graphics and PDF, and (according to the site) is copyrighted until the end of time. They could use your assistance (big time).
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Another 1995 technique we don’t often see. Why? Because it doesn’t help the search engines categorize your site. The only real text in the page is the TITLE tag (and thank goodness for that). On some of the subpages there are contrast issues.
Submitter comments: Camera Corner Connecting Point is our local authorized repair shop for both PCs and Macs. They do decent enough work and their web site looked decent enough, too. But they’ve added these people that appear in the middle of the screen and talk. When you try to scroll, they follow you. Yuck!
Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is another one of those ideas that must have seemed brilliant during a meeting because everyone was on LSD. When I say “brilliant,” I mean “bright” not “highly intelligent.” It was “bright” because the acid had just hit and they were seeing fluorescent colors.
If you go to a sub-page and then come back to the home page, the guy starts talking all over again. Does anyone at the company realize how annoying this is to a normal human being? This is stupid. It’s the web equivalent of not knowing Africa is a continent.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is a perfectly wonderful example of “Where’s the Focus?” OK, what is the focal point? Beats me. My eye is drawn toward the yellow “Test Takers e-Testing Login” button. I don’t think that’s really the focal point. There are too many items that are randomly scattered over the page.
The site’s tagline is “Measuring Critical Thinking Worldwide.” My critical thinking says your site sucks like an inverted tornado.
Submitter comments: I was just shown this site by an executive in a non-profit organization. Of course, he thinks it’s the greatest site he’s ever seen, but you may take a dimmer view.
First off, it uses Flash exclusively so there are no pages to bookmark or search via Google. But the real crime is the way it tries to artificially pump excitement into what are rather drab ideas. After waiting for a slow-loading video, you are rewarded with a man saying “Hello, and welcome to the site,” and not much else.
The site is designed for a 1280 x 1024 monitor and does not scale to fit smaller screens. At one point, I had to scroll around just to find the button that would let me return to a previous place in the site.
And for a site aimed at families and youth, its stark, mostly black design scheme seems friendly to neither. In all, just another showy site that delights clients but annoys and confuses the reader.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think the person submitting the site is too nice. This site is a festering pus sore on the soul of web design.
The text and links are hidden unless you click the “X” on the apple. Of course, it took a while for me to notice it. I tried clicking lots of other places first, with no luck. In my version of Firefox, I have all sorts of Flash- and ad-blocker add-ins which look like they kill the menus. There’s nothing for me to click.
Oh. Let’s not forget that the TITLE tag on this site is useless for search engine optimization.
Submitter comments: Came across this site looking for information about VLT (video lottery terminals). The website’s address is constantly flashing up at the top of the subpages (like Video Lottery) There’s a space motif for which there’s no logical reason, we have centered and flush-left text, and the site hasn’t been updated since June 2006.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: The site may have been updated in 2006, but I suspect the updates were minor. The home page has a message that the site is optimized for Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4 and the heyday of those programs was a long, long time ago — IE 4 was released in September 1997. Guess what? This site looks like it was designed in 1997.
Worst Websites
I’ve put up another YouTube video.