Submitter’s comments: I find it hard to believe that someone at some point in time found this “cool” and paid for it. It’s an Austrian university’s website.

The above is the link to the English version. The German version opens a pop-up onload as an extra. So all non-German-reading visitors are really missing out! :P

The “C” metaphor of the navigation scheme is obviously derived from the logo. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should! It’s wrong to put the logo on the bottom right, especially
when there’s so much empty space on the top left of the page!

The navigation is a set of image maps, and the whole thing is in layout tables.

I also dislike that on the home page it doesn’t highlight individual links on hover, making the blocks of links look like one huge link and that the subpages are made with frames.

If you reload the page with JavaScript disabled it will show the links for Masters and Bachelors degrees. As far as I can see, you can actually reach all content without JS and images enabled, but the metaphor really loses whatever impact it might have had.

As for your pet peeve, yup, we seem to have contrast issues too.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is the most bizarre navigation that I’ve seen in a long time. When you go to the German version of the site, no white menu text shows up. This is very bizarre.

I’ve never seen the main logo placed in this position before. On subpages, the logo is at the bottom of the page. Huh?

MCI Management Center

Submitter’s comments: May I present: American Media Professionals.

In my opinion the most glaring piece of suckiness is the spinning “AMP” — really, really annoying.

Click on a link. I chose the wedding link. Just about every line of text on the page is underlined. Are they all links? No. The huge fonts remind me of all the unsolicited right-wing spam that clogs my inbox. They also keyword loaded the bottom of every page.

This guy might do good video work, but his website isn’t very professional and makes me want to look elsewhere.

P.S.: The poor woman in the yellow shirt on the Corporate and Broadcast page looks like her breasts are being smashed by the equipment. (Made you look!)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I apologize to the submitter for not being able to reproduce his/her email as it was sent. To get the full effect, you need to see the original email.

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 1.21Mb, 1132- x 1696-pixel image of a bride into a 30Kb image just because you changed the WIDTH= and HEIGHT= attributes to WIDTH=”383″ and HEIGHT=”573.” It doesn’t work like that. Besides, Jesus has much better things to do.

The submenus don’t have the proper links. On the wedding page, there’s no link to the Corporate & Broadcast page. We also have the usual litany of text mistakes: multicolored text, centered text, etc.

BTW…Are there any web sites that don’t suck under the heading of videography services? Maybe we have another YAITS — Yet Another Industry That Sucks.

American Media Professionals

Submitter’s comments: I’m sure you’ve seen worse. Nevertheless…wait for the middle thing to finish loading. No, it’s not done. Wait some more. There goes the music, but it’s not finished. Wait for the 3 Fondue Pots of Mystery Meat Navigation to show up.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Technically, the site doesn’t need Flash or Mystery Meat Navigation. You can use the site without the MMN because the important information is in the regular navigation. The fondue pan Mystery Meat really doesn’t serve any useful purpose and, what’s worse, mousing over the pans doesn’t reveal any link information. You have to click to go to another level of Mystery Meat. Remember It’s a waste of time.

Of course, if you’re running Firefox with NoScripts or IE with Flash turned off, you get a blank page.

Flash is problematic sucks for lots of reasons (inconsistent interface across sites, eats up extra bandwidth, search engines have issues with Flash, you [generally] have loading screens, etc.), but the biggest reason is it doesn’t solve your visitors’ needs. Everything on this site can be accomplished by HTML.

The Melting Pot

Submitter’s comments: I know you keep rattling on how about how bad architect’s websites are (they are pretty bad). Here is a good example I found while researching ideas for our new site (text as images is going away).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: We certainly don’t need the splash page, but we do need some more contrast on the “real” home page. I find it amusing that there doesn’t seem to be a logo or home page link on the subpages (at least the ones I checked).

There are stranger examples on my architecture page. This site will soon join them.

AIR Architecture

Submitter’s comments: This isn’t your typical website (because it’s all Flash), but it is all kinds of awful. Make sure you watch the intro and then wait and watch the lady come back and insult you.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This reminds me of that Microsoft Beta search engine whose name I’ve forgotten. Same concept except Microsoft used an African American woman.

There are lots of valid uses for Flash on a car site — helping you build a car that you want to buy, looking at a car from different angles, etc. Having another MAMAW talk at you is not a good reason. Especially when she insults you. If I want to get insulted, I’ll talk to the wife. Oh. MAMAW stands for Moderately Attractive Middle-Aged Woman.

Chrysler Aspen Hybrid

Submitter’s comments: It’s almost as if some people don’t want people to visit their site. It’s all in Flash.
It has stupid animations for EVERYTHING. (Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should do it.)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s a very simple concept: If your website can be built with HTML, build it with HTML and not Flash.

What’s going on with all these sites where there are videos of people welcoming me to their website? On the positive side, when you stop the music it stops on every page. If you leave the site and come back, the blonde replays her welcome message. It would be nice if the site set a cookie so you only saw her once. Of course, most people won’t return to the site.

Complete Health Center

Submitter’s comments: Vincent: Here’s another site for you, if it hasn’t been submitted before.

Here is a web page that will take you back to the dark ages of the Internet in the mid-90’s, when changing font size and colour were considered the be-all and end-all of web design — at least by some developers’ standards. This site, however, is maintained now and has no business trying to sell me anything! Have a look.  Then go and clean your retinas with alcohol to take away the sting…

The most important thing that turns me away from even thinking about buying from these guys is that they deal in computers. My personal opinion is that any computer store web site should have a well thought out web page that is pleasing to look at — in the same way that I expect my mechanic to drive a car that runs smoothly and is not held together by rust. Anything less smacks of an unprofessional attitude toward me, the customer. I would not buy from this company purely based on this web site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Technically, I ran the site back on February 11, 2008 and here are the original comments from the submitter:

Australia is a beautiful country. I wish I could say the same about a lot of our web design. A lot of it reminds me of a line from the Men At Work song “Down Under” — “You better run, you better take cover.”

The site was one of five and consisted only of a link. I don’t understand why the site didn’t end up as one of the worst of 2008.

As the submitter notes, it’s EXTREMELY important for your site to have a professional (or at least a semiprofessional) look. “If you don’t look like a pro, the people will go” is a mantra for all web designers. On the other hand, WPTS sorta-kinda-maybe sucks because…well…that’s what the site is called. Actually, this incarnation is better than my art-fart version (click on the graphic to read the text), my sillier Flash version, and my Making It Bad On Purpose Version.

I suspect that, like many companies with sucky sites, they actually offer quality products. But who is going to take the time to find out once they see this site?

Off-topic note: You must see The Wrestler. I was expecting to see the best movie of all time. It was even better.

MSY Technology

Submitter’s comments: My son is going to play in a soccer tournament at this place in February, so I went to the site in hopes of finding some useful info. Aside from being butt-ugly and the layout being broken in Firefox, the big feature is this creepy CGI guy who starts talking to you in a computer-generated voice (MacinTalk?) when you mouse over him. What’s worse is the creepy-CGI-guy reloads on EVERY flipping page you navigate to!

Check out the stats page, where the stats load into this little frame so you have to scroll within the page to see. There’s much more to hate about this site, but I’ll let you find it on your own.

I honestly wonder what these people are thinking about.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s a waste of 54Kb to have the creepy-CGI-guy load on every page, but I’m thankful he isn’t set up to automatically speak when I land on the different pages. Still, I accidentally moused over him a couple of times. It’s just wrong to force people to think about avoiding him. This isn’t a war zone. I should be able to move freely about the page. Creepy-CGI-guy is a glorified “Welcome to our web site” message and it’s stupid to welcome people to your site. They’ve already clicked on a link. They’ve made the commitment.

We’ve got all sorts of text issues: ALL CAP TEXT — and lots of it; underscored text that looks like it should be a link, but isn’t; inconsistent text size; and just about every other text mistake you can make. Perhaps the nicest description of the text mess is “It sports wildly inconsistent text attributes.”

The Sportsplex

Submitter’s comments: I went to this site to find out about an MP3 recorder that has a line-in jack. I was faced with MMN, slow loading Flash pages with Mystery Meat Navigation, which might have something about their products. I’m not sure because I haven’t been able to figure it out yet.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, you did better than I did or BrowserCam did. We both got empty pages. I guess they really meant what they said in the TITLE tag — the next simplicity.

iriver