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

Site: Aaron Connor Photography

Submitter’s comments: I thought a photographer would have at least a little sense in good design.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: NOTE: He cleaned up his site enough so that it wouldn’t make the Daily Sucker. This picture of the original site shows you why it qualified.

Once again, we have a site where it looks like the person/company provides a superior product, but their sucky web site destroys credibility.

The site looks especially bad on a wide-screen (1920 x 1200) monitor (1.8Mb), the TITLE tag for the home page is “index,” we have scrolling yellow text on a red divider bar, multiple-colored text, text that runs to the edge of the screen along with text that doesn’t, a terrible logo, and at least one image that isn’t a link (while the others in the group are links), and the only link on a subpage is to the home page.

Aaron Connor Photography

Site: Monkey Bars

Submitter’s comments: I would like to humbly submit this site that I just had the misfortune to actively visit.

Sucky things that I noticed right off the bat:

1 – The site is merely a frame – the actual content comes from an entirely different domain – have they not heard of SEO optimization, accessibility, etc.? When you finally get to the original source code it’s a horrible jumble of inline styles and deprecated html.

2 – It’s Flash – WHY? as a result each page takes several seconds to load – and has a nauseating loading effect in the bargain.

3 – The menu is so slick the designers haven’t even noticed that two of the menu items have cut-off text.

4 – The conveniently underlined email address in the top banner isn’t actually clickable.

5 – Under “Centre Info” there is some detail about to get there – how about a map?

6 – Going to http://monkeybars.com.au just fails to load anything at all – redirects aren’t that hard, especially when you might be losing half your potential business.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’d like to comment using the references above.

1. The site is using the free Flash web site builder called Wix. The code is “spooky,” but I just recently looked at Google’s home page and their code is even spookier. I’m going to be discussing this topic next month.

2. I agree. Why?

3. I find it difficult to believe anyone can make this mistake. In addition, the page marker is even more horrible.

4. This might actually be OK — assuming they’re using this technique to hide their email address from spammers.

5. I agree. Perhaps they could have a link to a map.

6. Sigh. So many big organizations make this mistake. Harvard University made it until I pointed it out.

Monkey Bars

Site: Rev. John Giunta

Submitter’s comments: I saw this and I thought of you. Ropy contrast, image files 10 times larger than they need to be, seizure-inducing scrolling text, inconsistent backgrounds on sub-pages, badly organised link lists. And a rather scary mugshot.

I’m sure John Giunta is a very committed and talented man, but his web site…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Speaking of images, the Crafts page is 1,471,144 bytes. We also have IE transitions, boxes around graphics links, inconsistent sub-navigation (sometimes on top; sometimes on bottom), all sorts of text discrepancies (centered, flush-left, large, small, etc.), the reading list page is broken, etc.

Oh. We also have contrast issues on the home page. AccessColor says that “Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 55.62% of the total the text.”

Nice URL, though.

Rev. John Giunta

“Hulu’s Overrated Web Design” at http://ping.fm/UUwvQ

“Let’s make the web faster” http://ping.fm/wrDkj

“The Billion Dollar HTML Tag (attribute)” http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/24/the-billion-dollar-html-tag/

Site: Home of Heroes

Submitter’s comments: I’ve just started on as the web designer for my company. I’ve got a long list of improvements to make.  I really appreciate your checklists, by the way.

For what it’s worth, the page I’m submitting is beyond sucky:

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Seth Godin has an article entitled, Two ways to build trust. To summarize for those KidsToday who don’t like to read, “If your site doesn’t look like a pro, the people will go.”

For the readers out there: As far as I can tell, this site isn’t a commercial site (outside of the ads and sponsors), but one of the problems with the site is that you can’t tell what kind of site it is except, perhaps, an extreme example of what used to be called an “amateur” web site.

The site is about “patriotism, the Medal of Honor and military history.” I think America’s heroes deserve better. I hereby recommend the site for court martial under Article 5 of the Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.“

Home of Heroes

Site: Collecta

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I was reading an article about real-time search engines and one of the sites mentioned was Collecta. I went to the site, but it gave me a message that said I couldn’t use the site because I was using Internet Explorer 6. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

This screen capture shows the message Collecta gave me and the message I received when I went to What’s My User Agent? that says I’m using IE7.

This example shows that browser sniffing techniques aren’t always up to snuff. Hopefully, Collecta isn’t using some expensive browser-sniffing program, but is relying on a college CS major who’s interning for the summer. Still, this kind of mistake is soooooooo amateur.

Collecta

Site: Bromley Little Theatre

Submitter’s comments: I think this web site sucks.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Even though it’s an “arts” site, which is supposed to suck, there are a few inexcusable features I need to warn those of you with real sites (sites that provide information or sell products) so you don’t make the same mistakes.

There’s no need for a FlashSplash page — especially one that looks like we’re going to have 20 Mystery Meat Navigation buttons. Fortunately, they quickly disappear.

The worst problem is the lack of contrast on the navigation buttons. You can’t read them! Didn’t anyone from this organization look at the web site? Oh, the “about us,” “membership,” and “youth group” buttons lead to placeholder pages. Also, the TITLE tag of the real home page should not be “Home Page.” That doesn’t help the search engines and if you don’t help the search engines, they won’t help you..

Bromley Little Theatre

Site: Chapmans Solicitors

Submitter’s comments: You might like this one. This is a small UK law firm site that won’t display ANY navigation until you have clicked on the Disclaimer link. However, there is nothing to indicate that you need to do so.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is interesting because it demonstrates why you need to make sure you remove any extraneous pages from your site. Of course, it would be better if you put navigation on all your pages. The link is for the “home” page” — chapmans-solicitors.com/home.html — but it’s not the root page.

Granted, most people will discover the site through the basic URL, but still…

Here’s a screen shot, since they’ll probably take the page down.

Chapmans Solicitors

Site: Keep Earth Beautiful

Submitter’s comments: This was advertised as a nonprofit website source for info on environmental conservation.  It is so dissapointing to find something with such good intention done up so childish and nonprofessional.  The twirling planet, scrolling text, different colored/sized fonts, and shaking bear butt?!   It would take so little to make this a good website.  Please help us website gods, whereever you are!!!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Web site gods? Yeah. What ever happened to David Siegel? His single-pixel gif trick revolutionized web design. It’s sad how KidsToday forget their roots.

Today’s sucker would make GlobeGuy happy and it’s a classic example of Mistake #5 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.“ I love the fact that the Midi version of “We are the World” plays twice. My pancreas can’t handle this much sap. Where did I put my Novolog pen?

Keep Earth Beautiful

The Business Insider ran the above-referenced article recently and quoted ComScore as saying “Microsoft Sites increased its average daily penetration among U.S. searchers from 13.8 percent during the period of May 26-30 to 15.5 percent during the period of June 2-6, 2009.”

That’s wonderful, but irrelevant. I don’t care about Bing’s overall market penetration. What I care about is the quantity and quality of Bing’s referrals here on WPTS.

I use an inexpensive product called WebLog Expert, which provides me with good quantity information and some quality information about visitors to ths site. I can find out how long the average visitor stays on a page, but I can’t find out how long someone referred by Bing stays on the site.

Here are some quantity stats from WPTS:

Microsoft/Bing’s percentage increased, but so did Google’s. I’m not a math whiz, but I think Google’s referrals are 40 times larger than Bing’s. The beauty about numbers is you can massage them in all different directions. If Bing had increased their share to 1.8%, I could legitimately say, “Bing increased their penetration 10X in June” while whispering “Google is 5.5 times larger.” I love numbers.

Site: Dan Abnett Writer of Wrongs

Submitter’s comments: Home of my favorite author. He should REALLY stick to writing books and not web sites.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: One of the worst forms of navigation is Metaphoric Navigation, which is also known as MYSTifying navigation. Once you click on the door, you then are exposed to Mystery Meat Navigation. Oh, and I didn’t notice there was MMN to the side of the main picture. We’ve got “hidden” MMN. Hmm.

I love the fact that TITLE tag for the home page is “index.” Search engines, as we all know, just hate that. Another charmer is the background image repeats itself on large monitors. Here’s a screen capture from my monitor that shows the background repeats itself.

I’m not sure that I like the tagline “Writer of Wrongs.” Yes, I know it’s clever and nobody loves clever more than I do, but it makes it sound like he screws up and writes the wrong thing.

Dan Abnett Writer of Wrongs

Jeez, guys. There are a lot of important extensions that have been updated. Get back to the code mines.

Dust-Me Selectors 2.11 —
Finds unused CSS selectors.

Firefox Accessibility Extension 1.5.5.0
Adds tools for accessible navigation and the development of accessible web content.

YSlow
Make your web pages faster with Yahoo’s page performance tool.