Site: First Bank

Submitter’s comments: I deal with First Bank of Strasburg, Virginia and wonder why they wasted so much valuable landscape at the top of the screen on their “new and improved” site. It’s bad enough on my desktop computer or a normal size laptop, but when I fire up my handy little Acer Aspire One just about everything is below the fold.

I really wonder how many of us dumb old country folks need the included instructions on using the site. I doubt that everyone who uses the site thinks it’s an improvement.

The W3C validator counts 23 errors on the main page. At least I know that none of my students created the site.

I do like the way they used CSS to get the effect of an inline frame without using the iframe tag:

#scrollable {
color: #4D4E53;
padding: 0 10px;
width: 544px;
position: absolute;
top: 350px;
overflow: auto;
height: 320px;
}

… but it still looks like an inline frame and there are two vertical scroll bars on several pages! Usability!!!

If you click on Online Banking Login, you can’t get back to the main pages without knowing how to use the back button to jump back more than one page. Cute.

I don’t know if this qualifies as a Daily Sucker, but I feel better after analyzing the site!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Hmm. I only got 9 validation errors and 4 warnings when I checked the site using http://www.therespowerinone.com, but when I added index.html, I got the same 23 errors as the submitter found.

I’d like to add that there’s no need to welcome people to your web site. They’ve made the commitment — they are there so you don’t have to try to charm them.

I’ll take your word about the CSS. I don’t like the white text on the red navigation bar. It looks cheap and ugly.

While the site isn’t a car wreck on the Information Highway, it has enough interesting mistakes to qualify as a Daily Sucker.

First Bank

Site: MedFlight International

Submitter’s comments: You can have too much minimalism. Check out the DOCTYPE. If you try to validate it through W3C, it gives up in confusion.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I took a look at the source code, which said the page was created using HoTMetaL PRO 5.0. Wow. Talk about a blast from the past! I had completely forgotten about the product. Seems like I owned a copy way, way back in a galaxy a long time ago.

The truth is, the company doesn’t need much more than what this site (a single page, as far as I can tell) provides. It would be nice if the text were larger, we didn’t have the gray bars, and had better graphics and logo.

MedFlight International

Site: Keyence

Submitter’s comments: I have an interesting problem here. I want information on a Keyence EM-005(P) proximity sensor. I went the Keyence’s web site, and I searched my way in. I am in Canada, but I tried this through their USA route as well.

I found the proximity sensor page and I found the EM Series. The gratuitous Flash animation did not get in my way.

I clicked on Catalog and a form came up demanding that I sign up on their site. I cannot get information on their product without leaving all sorts of information on me! At the very least, this is inconvenient. Calling this a civil rights issue is a stretch, but I would rather not provide them my email.

If they want to sell proximity sensors, they are going to have to be more eager to tell me about them.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I understand why the company wants you to register to get a price quote. Their products are not something you go and buy on a whim. On the other hand, asking people to register to get a four-page, 159Kb PDF catalog seems like a lot to ask. The folks at Keyence need to read The $300 Million Button and decide whether or not they should continue to ask potential customers to register to get information.

To show you how it should be done, MailChimp offers a 65-page PDF guide (1.27Mb) called Designing, Coding & Delivering HTML Email and all you have to do is click a link. No registration required. I have a warm spot in my heart for these guys and I don’t know anything about them.

Since I don’t have a clue about the industries Keyence serves, I can’t tell if the site is easy to navigate or not. To me, it looks like a nightmare. I’m going to trust that if you understand what they provide, you’ll be able to navigate; otherwise, it’s a disaster.

Zen Habits(for those who don’t like to read and just want the link)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Recently, a well-respected site for the web design community cited a number of sites for their wonderful design. One of these sites intrigued me, but it was a site for a web designer and I don’t critique these types of sites to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest. However…

…the image above is a full-size, high-resolution screenshot of some of the text (with most of the customer name redacted).

When I went to the site I was hoping for a religious experience and I was not disappointed. I started speaking in tongues. Unfortunately, the web site made me speak in Tourette tongues. Lack of contrast makes me unhappy and sets me off.

Later in the day, I went to my RSS reader and saw that the Zen Habits blog was running a story called Would You Rather Be Right or Happy? It’s a great title so I clicked the link. As soon as I saw the text, I knew something was wrong — and my regular readers will know what I knew was wrong — the #3 Biggest Mistake in Web Design 1995-2015 — Contrast, Dammit. I went to the AccessColor web site to make sure I was right.

Of course, I was right — and that made me happy! Who says you have to choose between being right and being happy?

This screenshot shows you part of AccessColor’s report. Here are the important parts:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 8.99% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 78.77% of the total.

Text on background with images is for 0.03% of the total text.

Zen Habits – Would You Rather Be Right or Happy?

Narrabeen Beach Surf Life Saving Club(for those who don’t like to read and just want the link)

Submitter’s comments: Now this site sucks!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Someone once wrote in the comments, “1997 called and they want their web site back.” I think that’s applicable to this site. The frames look like they’re from 1997 and some of the links take you to strange-looking sites like Surf Life Saving Northern Beaches. Talk about small text!

Narrabeen Beach Surf Life Saving Club

There’s a new, FREE stock photography site called PhotoXpress. Here’s an article about it.

Piwigo (for those who don’t like to read and just want the link)

Submitter’s comments: Piwigo is photo gallery software.  Their site combines ugliness and un-usability to drastically poor effect.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Nicely phrased. God, I love clever writing.

Basically, almost everything on the site is difficult to read. Here’s a screen capture of what the Piwigo home page looks like on my monitor. Notice how the navigation is all over the place.

Their Remote site usage page is a contrast nightmare. According to AccessColor, both color difference and color brightness for the Remote site usage page does not meet the recommended standard for 90.74% of the total text.

The site is a classic example of Mistake #15 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — Mystical belief in the power of web standards, usability, and tableless CSS. On the bottom of their Documentation page, they have the XHTML and CSS standards-compliant buttons. Great. They’re standards compliant, but you can’t read the freakin’ page.

Piwigo

Triad Forensics (for those who don’t like to read and just want the link)

Submitter’s comments: As a designer, I am a huge fan of your site. I often reference your site to try to talk the clients I work for out of bad ideas — sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Anyway, I came across this web site the other day. Just click around a little and you’ll see why I suggested them.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: “Friends don’t let friends design Web Pages That Suck” was a bumper sticker I came up with years ago. I’m glad designers and other concerned citizens are trying to make the web more beautiful. Well, less ugly. Here’s a tip, when someone wants to make a bad design choice say, ” That’s fine, except there was this site featured on Web Pages That Suck that had that same feature. I don’t think it was on the Worst Web Sites of 2008 list, but I remember seeing it somewhere.”

Triad’s home page background image is distracting, the logo is well-made but cheesy looking, we’ve got a link counter visible, and we also have a mission statement. Mission statements are only necessary on non-profit web sites. This site’s Mission Statement is “to provide quality training and consulting services to our clients.” Duh. Of course. It’s like saying, “All babies must eat.” It only states the obvious.

Speaking of the obvious, obviously Triad’s method of returning to the home page from the Course Registration and Articles pages isn’t helpful. Let me explain visually:

Since I violated one of my central tenets — Don’t use graphics for text — let me translate from graphic to text:

The BACK button is NOT your web site navigation.

The Instructors page is sort of an homage to Marcel Proust. Instead of one long sentence, they believe in one long paragraph. Seriously, you need to break up a paragraph when there’s more than one thought.

The biggest problem is that EVERY page (well, every page I looked at) has a completely different style and could easily be mistaken as belonging to another site. Some pages use a red, white, and blue motif. Even U. S. Government web sites don’t use red, white, and blue. There’s nothing patriotic about forensics. Oh, and “Page Title” is NOT a good TITLE tag.

Triad Forensics

Going to watch Tony Fulgham play at Piecora’s. Saw him when he opened for James McMurtry.

Now that I’m living near the Oregon coast, I’m going to more Seattle concerts than when I lived there.