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

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