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

“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.

Site: FlatPak

Submitter’s comments: Check this one out because it uses lots of Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: And it’s Flash-based MMN. I shake my head every time I see a site like this. It appears — and it’s important to stress the word “appears” — that this is a company with a really cool product who’ve ruined their site by trying to be…really cool.

I suspect they’ve looked at too many architectural firms for influence. We don’t need the Flash and we don’t need the MMN. It’s that simple.

FlatPak

Combining a colonoscopy with the Washington State Kite Festival. I’m going to be high as a kite for both. Should be back Thursday with some gorgeous web sites from last century.

Site: Fujinon Binoculars

Submitter’s comments: This page appeared on Reddit under the title “view source for a trip down the rabbit hole.”

The page itself visually looks fine, but when you get to the source code and start scrolling down, that’s when trouble appears.  In one section of their code, one of their products is nested in 234 identical font tags deep.

I’m not sure if you have this WPTS rule: Know what your code is doing, or what your WYSIWYG is producing.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yep. It’s a rule.

Whenever I look at source code that’s screwed up like this, I’m always impressed by browser technology. How any browser can interpret this crap and put it on the screen is just amazing. Simply amazing.

The source code is 309,204 bytes and 259,244 of those bytes are white space. If you compressed the file, it would only be 42,960 bytes. I wonder how small it would be if it were designed correctly.

You have to view the source on this one.

Fujinon Binoculars

Site: Mercedes Restaurant

Submitter’s comments: Check out this awesome piece of “suck.”

Vincent Flanders’ comments: You have to like the date at the bottom of the page — 2004. Now you know why I don’t like to see dates on web sites unless you keep them…uh…up to date.

The colors are rather ugly (I’m hoping their restaurant isn’t using the site’s color scheme) and that huge image in the middle of the page should remind us all:

The good news is they have menus. The bad news is they don’t mark them with PDF icons.

Mercedes Restaurant

Site: Snider’s HEARTH STOVE

Submitter’s comments: This site is as bad as or worse than many you have showcased in the past on the Daily Sucker.  I don’t even know where to begin.  I get a headache just looking at it.  I think it pretty much speaks for itself.  Clearly, the designer has never seen another web site…ever.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’d like to point out the site needs a logo and it needs to get rid of the “Welcome to” message. What the site really needs is some textual healing. We have different-colored text, text with a background, text without a background, we have yellow text, dark blue links that you can’t read because they’re on a black background, TEXT IN ALL CAPS, underscored text that’s not link text, we have a second color (purple) for link text, and a third link color (orange).

Most surprising is we have keyword stuffing. Go to the bottom of the page and highlight the text. I thought keyword stuffing was dead.

Snider’s HEARTH STOVE

Site: Rocky Creek ATV Trail

Submitter’s comments: I saw this site and wanted to shout out  ”Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Mud Boggin/!  Bring the kiddies!”

It  has animated gifs, rotating text, loud colors, jumbled blocks of text on the pages and a strange arrangement of menu items.  Most sites put the link to the home page at the top of the menu!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: You’ve got to be kidding me! There’s a 90,672,768 byte media file that downloads when you visit the page. The video serves no purpose and should be removed. There’s no reason this video should exist. This is just bad design. Speaking of bad design, the whole site is 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 call this type of design the “I haven’t taken my antipsychotics in a while school of web design.”

Gee. I’ve never seen the word “Contactus” before. Is that some Roman god?

Rocky Creek ATV Trail

I just put up another video on YouTube and SmugMug about navigation.

Site: Cyprus Icon Artist

Submitter’s comments: This is a web site about a religious icon painter in Cyprus. What’s truly astonishing and unique about this web site, is that it has not one, but TWO splash pages (the one a simple image and the other one is Flash). After the splash screen, you are presented with a wonderful example of Flashturbation and the background music of religious singing. The whole web site is Flash based.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I would have bet serious money that a two-splash screen web site no longer existed. What do I know? There’s nothing here that couldn’t be done with some Javascript platform (JQuery and Mootools come to mind) and HTML. I’m using one on this page. Click the religious icon below to see a bigger image.

This person does fantastic work. Wow! It’s beautiful.

Because he’s using Flash, the text is too small and it’s difficult to read. The pictures are obviously out of proportion. We don’t need the music. We get it. Religion.

“But Vincent, don’t art web sites get a pass?” Normally, yes. The two Splash pages are just wrong wrong.

Cyprus Icon Artist

Site: Meyer Greeson Paullin Benson

Submitter’s comments: Here’s a site where every page is a Flash page, even simple pages that have only one photo and some text.

On the front page is a slideshow of some of this design firm’s projects. The most noticeable thing is that the photos are posterized (on purpose or by accident?). I guess it’s the only site that uses Flash to produce -lower- quality graphics. And if you want to copy and paste the design firm’s address and phone, forget it, it’s in the Flash animation.

And the kicker is that the site isn’t 100% Flash, it’s single Flash slides inserted into the individual HTML pages. So, go to the About us page, (a link to an HTML page) but the entire page is a Flash slide. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make a bunch of individual Flash pages.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The slide show is just another bad way to create a FlashSplash page.

It would be an insult to say these folks do excellent work. Jeez. Just take a look at the projects they’re involved in. “Impressive” doesn’t cut it.

On the other hand, what gives with the web site? I’m used to seeing architecture firms go over the top on their web sites, but this one is more like “under the bottom.”

There’s nothing on this site that couldn’t have been done better using HTML. The pages would be smaller and would load faster. They would be easier to edit. It’s pretty simple. If you can create a site in HTML, you don’t need to create it in Flash.

Meyer Greeson Paullin Benson

I’m actually a really nice person, but I’m getting really, really upset that some web sites can’t handle simple typos. I went to Pollstar to find out if the Drive By Truckers were playing anywhere near me. In the search box I quickly typed “Drive By Truckersd” and hit the ENTER key before I realized my fingers had accidentally hit the “d” key. Here’s the screenshot of what resulted.

C’mon, geniuses. I got every letter right except the last one. How hard is it to figure out what I wanted. What about people who type “Drive Bye Truhkers?” Yes, I’m stupid for making a mistake, but you didn’t keep my original search term in the search box. If you did, I could just go up and hit backspace to erase the “d” and then hit enter and get my results.

Amazon knows how to handle my mistake. The clowns at Pollstar don’t.

Site: Descent 2

Submitter’s comments: Hello. Since the search for the Worst Web Site of 2009 is still ongoing, I thought it would be a good idea to submit for your consideration the site Descent2.de, based around the game Descent II and the modified engine and level editor. Among the various annoying features of this site:

• A quasi-Mystery Meat navigation system featuring a slide-out Javascript menu that you have to mouse over to view
• The menu options change depending on what part of the site you’re on. To get to certain pages from other pages you have to return to the home page so you can find what you need in the menu.
• Mixed text sizes and colors to rival Time Cube in sheer insanity.
• Light blue text on gray and other hare-brained color choices.
• News in a skinny little frame way off to the right that’s about five times the length of the main page.
• Web page takes more than 30 seconds to load on a 2-megabit DSL connection.

And of the Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015:

#1: Believing people care about you and your web site.

#4: Using design elements that get in the way of your visitors. The context-dependent menu system. That FUCKING menu system. It’s infuriating.

#6: Have you seen another web site yadda yadda.

#7: Navigational failure: YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT! For instance, if you click “Downloads”, you get some downloads, but there are other downloads in the bulleted links below “Downloads” and you can’t get to those pages from “Downloads”, meaning you have to backtrack. And there’s some content that’s only on the forum, and in terms of finding a specific topic or download, a forum is by definition a horrifying navigational failure.

#8: Using Mystery Meat Navigation: The menu has to be moused over before it slides out and god only knows what will be there when it does.

#11: Too much material on one page: Do I really need to know your favorite levels that someone else made when I visit your home page with the intention of downloading your game engine?

#12: Confusing web design with a magic trick: Step right up! Step right up! Here you will see this menu. Now, when you click any option on the menu, all the other options will magically change! So, care to take a click young man? Go ahead! Ta-dah!

#14: Misunderstanding the use of graphics: The banner is a visually busy, flashy render that measures 566×360 pixels and weighs in at 327,000 bytes. That is not a proper banner.

#16: Javascript: It powers the Sidebar Menu from Hell.

9 out of 16. That’s not a good score.

Well, have fun with the site, and by fun I mean frustration and annoyance. Imagine trying to download a copy of the engine and all related accessories, wading through page after page through a maze of ever-shifting links and buttons. It hurts.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Actually even 1 out of 16 isn’t a good score.

Interestingly, as much time as I waste in my every day life and being one of the millions of members of the rock group AD / HD (sorry for the bad joke), it’s surprising I don’t play computer games. I’m not sure why, except they just don’t interest me. It’s the same with drinking alcohol. I’m not interested in spending hours puking my guts out in a toilet. I suspect that, like most sites featured on WPTS, the end product / service is excellent. Why people with good products put up sucky web sites is beyond me.

I’d like to point out the side navigation is a real problem. #1 Because it’s next to a Google ad, you’re likely to not see the navigation because most of us are trained to ignore ads on web sites. #2 It’s next to a Google ad. I may be wrong, but I’m not sure if this is permitted.

Saying a game web site sucks is like saying a black hole sucks. Yes, they all do. In fact, it’s a badge of honor for them to suck, but there are levels of suckiness. Just because computer game sites are expected to suck doesn’t mean they have to suck as badly as this one. There are other game sites that suck — but suck less and should be used as “inspiration.” I dredged the following sites from my memory:

World of Warcraft: I don’t know how I got to this page, but the page is too long, you have to scroll horizontally to see everything, the text is small, etc.

Halo: (this particular link is now dead) Definitely cool, but the bottom navigation isn’t readable.

Actually, I just discovered a game site that looks pretty good. The Sims 3. Hey, it can be done. OK, not all game sites suck.

Descent 2