If I remember correctly, the glory days of Sears are long past. Their web site isn’t helping. In fact it’s hurting them. It’s one thing if your web site looks like a car wreck on the information highway, but when you keep people from spending large sums of money on your web site you need to be slapped silly.

Like John Mellencamp, I live in a small town. When we have a power outage, it lasts for days so I need a portable generator. Sunday night (12-28) I go to Sears.com, find what I’m looking for, and try to order the generator. Since it’s a big item, they need to deliver it directly to my residence. No problem — I give them my home address. Since I live in a small town, mail — including credit card bills — gets delivered to a post office box. Since I don’t click the checkbox that says “Billing address is same as shipping address,” Sears lets me key in my billing address. I type “PO Box 123456″ and hit submit, but the form doesn’t accept it — but there’s no error message. I try to go to the next step, but Sears gives me an error message that it needs a billing address and kindly provides me a link to create one.

You guessed it — I’m in loop hell. I think, “Maybe it’s my browser. Maybe there’s some stupid pop-up blocker running.” I use another browser that doesn’t have any add-ins. I try to order again. Same problem. I try a third browser. Nothing. As a normal, red-blooded American male, I’m massively pissed.

Monday morning (12-29) I call up Sears.com’s web support and mention my problem. The woman on the other end automatically knows what’s wrong as soon as I say, “It won’t accept my PO Box.” She says, “You have to spell PO Box out — ‘Post Office Box.’” You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.

Yes, they’re aware of the problem, but I suspect the problem has been around a long, long time. If they haven’t fixed such an obvious mistake by now, it must mean the site has other problems that are far, far worse. If this happened to Jakob Nielsen, he’d politely tear them a new one.

Sears should die. Wait. I think it is.

Submitter’s comments: This is one of the very few web sites that actually should have a black background.

It used to just suck as Archive.org’s last captured version of October 19, 2007, demonstrates.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There are 50 billion reasons why this should be the Worst Web Site of 2008. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the favicon on the Archive.org version an American flag? Remove your flags from your web site. Now.

Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC
The last version from Archive.org

Submitter’s comments: This maker of (expensive) fashion sunglasses has some really fine products — unfortunately I can’t figure out what they are or how to get to them on the site. The site appears to be all Adobe Flash — but the problem is that even if you have the latest version of the plugin, it’s still impossible to find anything on their site. Mystery Meat Navigation is redefined on these guys — they have 3 completely useless links at the top and everything else is pictures — which are horrifically tiny on a laptop screen.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: They make sunglasses? Are you sure? Only about 10% of the pictures have anyone wearing sunglasses. You’re supposed to be able to look at a web page and figure out what product/service the company provides. Nope. Even the URL — killerloop.com — doesn’t help because the URL gives the impression they’re selling sound loops to musicians and DJs. I can just hearing someone at the branding meeting say, “We’re too cool to let anyone know who we are.”

KILLER LOOP SS08

Submitter’s comments: My suggestion is “The amazing web site of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”:

Shall I compare this to a train wreck now?
Its whole design all logic doth defy,
The text and background colors I avow,
Make train wrecks easier upon the eye,
Sometimes the text is centered on the page,
While images are upon the left arrive,
Though such design was one time all the rage,
That time, we know, was nineteen-ninety-five,
The page provides advice on how to view,
(For those who do scroll down enough to see’t),
And those, I fear, shall number very few,
Who will for long enough abide such shee’t,
But long as tools like PageMill do exist,
Web sites that suck like this will still persist.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: We have a winner for best commentary of 2008. Entries are closed. I bow before your genius.

The amazing web site of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Submitter’s comments: I needed some information on the Sheriffs office and came across this gem. After waiting for the “click to enter” message to finally appear, I just clicked the sheriff’s badge. I entered the site and realized you lose the navigation with each page. Not to mention the bad graphics and blinking. Ugh, I left the site.  Maybe I can find the info elsewhere.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I swear I’ve used this site before, but I can’t find it in any records that I have. This site reminds me of the old Byrd’s song, “You All Look Alike.” Most police web site look alike —”They look (a)like they suck.”

We don’t need the FlashSplash page, but we need the “real” home page to look much better. God, I hate gold-colored table borders on a black background. The site also uses a weird font — Engravers MT — which I miraculously have on my system so the text comes out looking the way the designer wanted. Of course, not everyone has this font on their computer.

The Narcotics Task Force page is too wide for my browser window, so I have to scroll horizontally — another mistake — and even though the text is large, the dark green text is hard to read on the black background. Like the submitter said, there’s no navigation except the back button.

Franklin County Sheriff’s Office

Submitter’s comments: I nominate Jefferson Millwork for a place of “honor” on the Daily Sucker.

Let’s see how many problems I found on this “winner” of a site.

• The TITLE tag for each page is “Untitled Document”
• When using Firefox, the top of most pages shows <%
  @LANGUAGE=”JAVASCRIPT” CODEPAGE=”1252″%>.
• Just about all text is centered — and rather crude looking.
• Contrast for links on pages with black background (just about all the pages) is horrible.
• Their motto from the main page is “There are Times When Only the Best Will Do.” Couldn’t this be one of those times, please?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This screen capture shows the Javascript code at the top left and rest of the page with its wonderful, centered text.

The home page logo sucks in Internet explorer and I’d like to mention the stereotypical American flag found on almost all industrial web sites.

The biggest mistake of all is that the link marked “Employment Brochure and Application” isn’t. I went through all 65 pages and all I saw was the fantastic work they produce. At 6,776,152 bytes, this unmarked PDF file (another mistake) isn’t an employment application. I realize times are tough, but at least put up a real job application form or relabel the document. I’d be pretty upset if I wanted a job and downloaded this file.

Once again, another company whose work is beautiful has a web site that’s uglier than a monkey’s armpit.

Jefferson Millwork and Design

I know, I know I use Javascript. You have to if you want detailed analytics (or any kind of advanced features) but there are lots of reasons not to use JS. Almost every time there’s a security alert about an unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability — and there’s a big one out now (with a patch due Wednesday) — Microsoft suggests you turn Javascript off.

Here’s a screen shot and I’ve highlighted the applicable parts.

Microsoft isn’t the only browser that has ever had JS problems and it isn’t the only problem with JS. Until recently, JS has been a drag on web site performance. It’s still a drag unless you place your JS correctly on the page or delay its delivery.

Submitter’s comments: I think the large “Ghostweb Navigation Menu” near the bottom of the long front/cover page is such a wonderful afterthought.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think we have a new champion in the category “Main Navigation That’s So Far Away It’s In The Next County.” It’s almost 13,000 pixels from the top of the page.

There are a lot of other things wrong — flush left and centered text, multiple font sizes, ugly, blue divider bars, ugly background, animations, tables with borders, clickable images with borders, images with white background that looks ugly against the regular background, and so on, and so on.

Here’s a full-length screen capture
Here’s a screen capture that gives a feeling for the length of the home page

There is some centered text that says, “Telephone the Dead Today.” I’d change it to “Telephone a Web Design Firm Today.”

International Ghost Hunters Society

Submitter’s comments: Here’s a possible candidate for websites that suck.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Possible? There are many disturbing features, but the fact that you have to scroll horizontally in the left frame to read the text may be the most disturbing. The second most disturbing feature is the left frame automatic scrolls in Internet Explorer, but not Firefox. Then, we have the color scheme. Hold on. The most disturbing aspect of the page is the source code — OMG it’s a Microsoft Word document saved as HTML. FUBAR

Zaddock Pratt Museum