“A Look Behind The Curtain At Facebook’s Optimization Efforts”

Green Mountain Mall

Submitter’s comments: Bright colors! Did they use a black and white monitor to create this site or was the person just color blind? And does anyone care where the gas meter room is located? (See “Lay out” button at top.)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Tomorrow, I’m going to feature a very, very important non-profit web site that also doesn’t understand the concept of contrast. Today’s sucker understands it even less and it’s amazing to me that anyone can look at the site and read anything.

“Lay out” should be “Layout” and there should be some indication this is a PDF file. It isn’t very helpful to have the URL as your TITLE tag.

Green Mountain Mall

Hermès

Submitter’s comments: I don’t have much comment on this site. Maybe it’s my bad, but I’m totally lost in the navigation. After desperately clicking everywhere to skip the starting animation, I discovered that the “?” pops up a window where you can read information about direct navigation. It only takes a couple of minutes to read and memorize… Little squares, gallop, left-and-right, animated and always disappearing menu made me close the site, though I know it has an article somewhere I was interested in.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This site sucks worse than the headline band at the Tractor Tavern last night and they sucked mightily. (I took a young, beautiful blonde woman to see “The Maldives.” Their first song had two lines in it and one of the lines was “Goodbye” repeated over and over and over. I wrote better lyrics when I was six years old. Two songs later, we both said “Goodbye” to the Maldives.)

Yes, I know this is a fashion site and they probably should be exempt because fashion is about appearance and not reality. However, even in my most socialistic, class-hating moments, I find it impossible to believe that rich people (the target audience) would put up with this nonsense.

Yes, this site is beautiful, but it’s unusable. It’s like using fine china to serve crap. This web site may easily be the Worst Site of 2009 and could be one the worst web sites of this century.

Note 1 : The beautiful blonde mentioned above is my daughter. One of the opening acts was our favorite local band, North Twin. They totally rocked, kicked ass, and took names. They obliterated The Maldives. To put it in perspective, it was a lot like the time Led Zeppelin opened for Iron Butterfly at the Fillmore East…

Note 2: My daughter, no doubt in an effort to upset me this morning, said “Here’s somebody who likes the Maldives’ ‘Goodbye’ song.” She showed me an article entitled Maldives – Listen To The Thunder and, in the interest of presenting an opposing viewpoint, here’s the relevant text:

In the first song on the Listen to the Thunder “Goodbye,” also the lead song of the Maldives debut EP which we were so enamored with last year. Dodson sings by repeating “Goo-ood-byeeeeeee-oooooooh” over a heavy, almost solemn beat, his words intertwined with pedal steel, fiddle, and guitar lines. From the listeners perspective, the song can feel a sort of a progression. Through turmoil a coming-to-terms, yet much remains unsaid between the song’s spare lyrics, and we’re left to let the song find our own resolution in the final bittersweet guitar lead guitar lines. Today curiously, I found no resolution at all in that end, or the process of the song at all. I was simply left mournful.

Where the reviewer sees profundity, I see pretentiousness; however, unlike web design, both sides of a music debate can be right. Check out the whole article at the link above. The review is…interesting.

Hermès

Site: Spangles

Submitter’s comments: I was an avid submitter when you were on year one. It’s depressing that there is enough bad design still out there to keep you going a decade and a half later.

Here’s one to make your eyes and ears hurt.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What’s more depressing is there will be enough bad design to keep me going another decade and a half.

I like this example because it’s not as obvious as the ones in this group, this group, this group, or this group. (Here’s a helpful tip: don’t use vague link titles like “this group.” It tells your visitor nothing.)

The main problem isn’t the Flash. The main problem is there’s nothing in the Flash that can’t be eliminated or done by HTML. We don’t need the stinking piano at the bottom. We don’t need the sound and we don’t need the spinning record that does nothing once you click it (it says “Click Me.”

Spangles

Free Photoshop SpeedUp (Windows) http://bit.ly/rugow – Scroll to bottom of the page. There’s also a free PDF SpeedUp.

Sonic

Submitter’s comments: Avid reader here. I was hungry and looking for something to eat for lunch. I wandered on over to sonicdrivein.com and was amazed at how crappy the web site was.

First off, it takes a long time to load. Let’s face it, if I’m looking up food on the internet, chances are I’m hungry and don’t want to sit there and waste precious time waiting for a page to load.

The site has a lot of Flash stuff and those two annoying guys on the commercials pop up and basically nag you to death while you are deciding what to do. I hate sites that talk to you.

The background on the site is a large picture, which makes it hard to distinguish other page elements. If you click on the “explore menu” a big menu comes up and you move it around with your cursor. I tried it for a few seconds and got a headache. There is an option for the “quick view” menu, if you can find the tab at the top of the page. The contrast of the text against the red headers is terrible.

There is just way too many cutesy, gimmicky things on this site for my taste. I think restaurants should be pretty straight-forward in their web presentations. This is who we are, this is what we have for you to eat, and this is when we are open. That’s pretty much all I want to see.

Thanks for giving me something to read and laugh at everyday.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The site is even worse if you have a large portrait monitor. Flash, of course, fills up the window. In general, that’s a good idea and one of the reasons people use Flash, but on my monitor the home page sucks. Oh, and this particular screen (they rotate) scared the bejesus out of me.

With its horizontal scrolling, the Flash menu page is out of control. The site also has Mystery Meat Navigation, and Mystery Meat is the last thing you want to see at a restaurant. Well, I suspect the last thing you want to see is a Health Inspector shaking his head in disgust. Speaking of Health Inspectors, here’s a report on my favorite eating spot in Bellevue, Washington — Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Oops.

Sonic

I’m really, really, really tired of all these formulaic headlines for articles. If you don’t know the formula, I’m going to give it to you:

[number] [hyperbole-based modifier] [name of software or web-related noun] for your [some type of mental state]

which ends up as:

10 Gorgeous Websites for your Inspiration

A variation on a sad theme:

[number] [hyperbole-based modifier] [name of software or web-related noun] [noun] — which ends up as:

30 Amazing JQuery Tips
40 Brilliant Photoshop backgrounds
75 Exciting web-design tips

There isn’t any content there. It’s somebody going out to Google and running some searches and then compiling the links, grabbing screen shots and adding a paragraph of text to each entry. It’s like those CDs you see advertised on TV: 40 Power Ballads. Yeah, that’s creative.

What set me off was a recent article about how popular web sites looked in the late 1990’s. While it’s interesting to see what Adobe or Apple looked liked back then, there isn’t much you can learn from these sites. I’m also not sure how much inspiration you can get from looking at any kind of good examples. Looking at this middle-aged man is not going to inspire me to get off my rear end (may be NSFW) and excercise, It’s going to depress me and I’m going to head toward the refrigerator.

On the other hand, you can really learn from and be inspired by web sites that are featured on Web Pages That Suck — especially those from the late 90’s. At the very least, you can learn to take the other direction. More importantly, you’ll feel good about your design skills because nobody ever looked at the examples on Web Pages That Suck and said, “I’m a horrible designer because I can’t create these kinds of web sites.” When you leave this site, you’ll feel good about your design skills.

I’m going to temporarily succumb to the madness and create a non-numeric bullshit title for an article, but I’m putting some content and some work behind it.

Gorgeous Websites From The Late 90’s To Inspire You — If You Have No Taste

I just had a colonoscopy — which is nature’s way of saying “you’re old” (yes, sadly, I am old enough to need one). The results? Contrary to popular belief in the artsy corners of the web design world, I do not have my head up my ass.

Scene-Clean – The horror!

Watch the YouTube video version.
Watch the SmugMug video version.

Advanced Tactical Firearms – Turn up your speakers <grin>.

Watch the YouTube video.
Watch the SmugMug video version.

Admissions Department University of Missouri, Rolla – Somebody went Star Trek crazy.

Watch the YouTube video.
Watch the SmugMug video version.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – The first woodpecker that comes along will destroy civilization.

Watch the YouTube video.
Watch the SmugMug video version.