Site: Warehouse Furniture

Submitter’s comments: They’ve had their advertisements running on TV for some time now, and needless to say, there might be some similarity between the quality of their ads and the quality of their web page.

Right off the bat, you notice their wonderful red-to-yellow gradient background, with black surrounding it. Their layout is fixed, and they’re letting you know it. There’s useless Flash animations scattered throughout their site and take a look at the code that powers the web site. It’s wretched. It seems to have been generated by something.

One more thing, they resize their images in the browser. Quite large images, I must add. The recliner images look like they’ve just been squashed by an anvil.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s been a long time since I’ve seen gradients like these. The site would be improved by 80% if the backgrounds disappeared. I got rid of the background and this screenshot shows I was wrong about the 80% improvement. It’s more like 500%.

We certainly don’t need a Flash logo or much of any of the Flash that’s here. The reason the recliner images are squished is probably because they scanned in an ad and made it fit in a smaller space.

Warehouse Furniture

Site: Clo

Submitter’s comments: I guess I just really don’t get the fact that to read anything on the page, the user has to horizontally scroll instead of down like a normal website…I’m sure there’s more about it that sucks pretty hard. For a bar that prides itself on being pretty edgy (it’s the only bar in the world with no bartenders, and a touch screen menu), their web site is pretty…blah looking.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Strange. I thought horizontal scrolling was a thing of the past. Obviously, it isn’t. Once again, we have contrast problems. The Halloween-themed black text on the orange background is difficult to read and lack of contrast is listed as the 3rd biggest mistake in my article Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015:

According to Wikipedia: “Contrast is the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background.” According to Vincent Flanders: “Without proper contrast, visitors to your site can’t read the text and if they can’t read it, they will leave it.” Here’s a web site that gives a really great explanation of the need for contrast — and it’s visual.

C’mon.

Clo

Site: Ellis Island Casino and Brewery

Submitter’s comments: I was browsing potential dining experiences in Las Vegas, and I came across this fiercely awful site for the Ellis Island Casino and Brewery – it’s truly appalling.

The site looks as though it stepped fresh from 1996 with clip art, photographs with bezels, at least one HUGE image, bad, broken, table-based design. It’s just a general train wreck. I thought you and your regular readers might like to share in the suffering I had to deal with.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Like yesterday’s Daily Sucker, this site is an excellent example of bad web design.

1. The look of the casino site reminds me of the screenshot of five web sites — four which “borrowed” the look of one of the fifth site (I never knew who was the original). Those curves went out a long, long time ago.
2. Most web sites try to cram everything on the home page and there isn’t enough white space. This site has too much white space (on my monitor). I’ve uploaded a screen capture that I’ve annotated with other comments.
3. On the home page, 2 sections of underscored text are links, but 2 are not. See the screenshot above.
4. The Casino News page looks like it’s one big image map.
5. The Calendar Page is also one big image map that takes forever to load.
6. The menu on the Restaurant page is a PDF file, but it’s not marked as such.

That’s a good start.

Ellis Island Casino and Brewery

Holy Mother of God! This sucks.

Site: Red Apple Wellness

Submitter’s comments: People are obsessed with spinning objects, I guess, but the spinning apple really isn’t working for me.

And if you didn’t have dizziness before you visited the Dizziness page, you will afterwards.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is interesting because it’s not a total car wreck, although it’s bad.

As the submitter stated, WTF is with the red apple? Just because your business is called red apple doesn’t give you the right to put a revolving red apple on your web site. Can you imagine how stupid it would look if my high school classmate, Danny Dick, had a rotating danny on his web site?

The doctor needs a real logo, get rid of the “Welcome to” message, fix a broken tag that lets the HTML show on the page (classid=”clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D” id=ieooui>), and get some better looking navigation.

The navigation is bad for a number of reasons: it’s ugly, words run off the edges, and the color scheme is just wrong. I’m sorry, but a brown color scheme just doesn’t work for this site. Here are two places to get some inspiration: Place 1 and Place 2.

Besides the dizziness you’ll get on the Dizziness page, somebody doesn’t understand the concept of paragraph. You have a number of sentences that should be divided into more than one paragraph.

Red Apple Wellness

Site: Vehicles – Division of Air Resource Management FDEP

Submitter’s comments: This is a good one. I hope they don’t take it down because I imagine the webmaster is freaking out.

Hahahahahaha I don’t know if they should win a contest for the most navigation or the snazzy clip art. Hahahahaha  WOW you’d expect more from an agency with a huge IT department!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Actually, I’d expect them to understand the importance of contrast. Government agencies, I believe, are supposed to have web sites that are accessible. However, according to AccessColor:

Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 2.35% of the total text.

Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 9.06% of the total text.

Wait a minute. They actually have an accessibility page. Hmm. Something doesn’t compute.

They also need to either make the text larger about their use of PDF files or put PDF icons next to the names of the files. Actually, it’s worse than that. I just noticed at least one Microsoft Word document, so basically they don’t know WTF they’re doing are providing incorrect information about the types of documents on the page.

There’s a LOT of navigation and much of it is hard to read. They need to use more leading on the navigation that uses the double right arrow (what is this called?) symbol.

Vehicles – Division of Air Resource Management FDEP

Site: Jack the Ripper Walk

Submitter’s comments: Text heavy, horrible colour choices, and it makes you click 6 different links to get to the tour schedule.  Wild goose chase web design is not a great way to make people want to buy what you’re selling. 

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Part of me wants to lump this site in with yesterday’s and say that it actually might be OK since this is the type of site their audience expects. On the other hand, it’s extremely difficult to book a walk because you have to wade past pages that play tricks with your eyes. I’m especially not fond of this unnamed page. I get dizzy just looking at it. Maybe it’s because, as my daughter says, “You’re really old, dad.”

Yes, it’s a site about Jack the Ripper, but do we really need the blood red colors? It’s not as clever or as tasteless as the page my good friend and co-author Michael Willis created about O. J. Simpson. I thought the “Nicole” tattoo was a nice touch.

It’s very difficult to know what you should click and that’s a sign of bad navigation. It’s the Daily Sucker because they make it way too difficult to book a walk, the colors are just awful, and giving visitors vertigo is not a virtue.

Jack the Ripper Walk

Site: All Star Farm

Submitter’s comments: The only reason I know about this site is because it came up as an ad in Gmail, meaning that someone actually paid real money to advertise this web site.  I’ve spent two years building a web site for our business that I’m not ashamed of (most of the time).  This site makes me want to put my eyes out with a hoof pick…

I’m sure my wife could chime in on the horsie aspect of it, but that’s a different blog…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is an incredibly tacky looking site. I just love the fact that allstarfarm.com redirects to angelfire.com. Nothing says “professional” like redirecting your domain to a free web site. Yes, I know we’re in a econopocalypse (a word I borrowed from the submitter’s email), but you can’t look cheap. I also love the star that follows your cursor. I’m thinking about using one of my head shots as a cursor. Is that scary or what?

On the other hand…this site is about fantasy horses and I can make the case that this gold-gilded Gorgon is exactly what the audience for this type of product expects. That’s why I said, “Maybe It’s The Daily Sucker.” Obviously, most businesses would do well not to use this site as a template.

All Star Farm

Site: Metropolitan Louisville ASPA Chapter

Submitter’s comments: Whoo boy. This is a sucker for sure! It nearly burned out my eyes. Enjoy!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Actually, you need Firefox to have your eyes burned out by the BLINK tag. Haven’t seen that one in a while.

The main problem is the page weighs in at 7.79Mb. I’m sure you can figure out why. They’re scaling the images down, but they’re using HTML to scale them instead of actually scaling down the dimension of the files. One of the images is 3072px × 2304px, but they scaled it down to 170px × 127px. Guess what? The image file size stays the same — 2.505Mb.

In Internet Explorer, you don’t have the divider bars. Check out my BrowserCam screenshots.

As my Twitter posts will show, I’m currently reading 8 Excellent Tools for Optimizing Your Images. These folks need to do the same.

Metropolitan Louisville ASPA Chapter