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

PARTNERS + simons

Submitter’s comments: Static image so important, they had to hide the navigation. Never had to ‘drag’ a hidden nav-bar open before.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What’s worse is that the hidden navigation doesn’t always show up. It didn’t show up on my IE 7, but it did on IE8. Here are some BrowserCam screen shots that show the hidden navigation doesn’t always show up.

PARTNERS + simons

Danneman Signs

Submitter’s comments: Yikes!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What drives me stark raving crazy is the fact that I can’t read some of the text. Why? Because there’s not enough contrast.

Does anyone with two working eyes ever look at their pages and notice that the text is impossible/hard to read?

Danneman Signs

Article: “10 signs you don’t understand web analytics” – http://bit.ly/7OXVUm

DPGraph

Submitter’s comments: I was searching the web for some assembly language information and I “crossed eyes” with this site. Since then I cannot type properly, I’ve grown a third ear and my retina is starting to decay <grin>.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ironically, the site has found a good use for animated images — to show off their 3D graphing software. Unfortunately, they couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to use an animated GIF background. This takes the site from being sloppy to Over the Top.

All they have to do to improve the site and raise it to the level of mediocre is just remove the animated background. I just changed one HTML statement and made the site infinitely better. (In case they remove the background image, here’s a screen shot of the original page.)

DPGraph

Stingrays Studios

Submitter’s comments: Check out this bad boy. It’s the BEST auto art web site in the WORLD, and I can’t for the life of me understand what they do.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yeah, it also took me a while to figure out what they do. I think they make custom cars, but I might be wrong and that should be a warning sign (see #2 below). The site commits over half of the Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015:

1. Believing people care about you and your web site.
2. A man from Mars can’t figure out what your web site is about in less than four seconds.
4. Using design elements that get in the way of your visitors.
6. Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.
7. Navigational failure.
10. Forgetting the purpose of text.
11. Too much material on one page.
14. Misunderstanding the use of graphics

Oh, and the home page is 13.82Mb.

Stingrays Studios

Official Electric Church

Submitter’s comments: There’s something bizarre about not being able to read what’s on a church web site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I agree. You’d think it would be more important to be able to read what’s on a church site than on a commercial site. If the Bible were written like religious-oriented web sites are designed, Christianity would only exist as a small Jewish cult.

Ironically, this site looks like a church site, but it’s a site for a band. Yes, I know music sites are exempt because they’re not real businesses and nobody cares about them but their fans, but the site is more useful than most sites, except for the lack of contrast.

I ran the home page through AccessColor and they said:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 0% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 87.9% of the total the text.

   A Warning message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

Text on background with images is for 7.39% of the total text.

What’s important to note is that the text on background with images is actually the menu and you can’t read the menu. Didn’t anybody to see if you could read the text on the menu? The text is also too light, but it isn’t as bad as other sites like Xerox and Techsoup.org.

Official Electric Church

The 5 Doves

Submitter’s comments: Maybe there is a secret network of these sites that feed off each other’s design efforts.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Oh, god. That’s just what I don’t need — a conspiracy theory about Over-the-top Web Sites <grin>. On the other hand, it would explain so much.

I’ve seen sites where they use different colors on lines of text; I’ve seen sites where they use different colors on each word; however, I don’t remember too many sites where there’s a different color for each letter of text.

The web site’s name, “The 5 Doves,” initially led me to believe I was going to see a 50′s cover band or a Christian music group. I got the Christian part right. That’s all that’s right with this site.

The 5 Doves

There’s Kenneth Biros and there’s Kenneth Biros.

Website Owner’s Manual — 2 free PDF chapters from the book – http://bit.ly/6EVKqK and http://bit.ly/8Mftfl

Shroud of Turin

Submitter’s comments: I was just visiting this site and realized I’d never submitted it to WPTS, and it certainly is very sucky. Frontpagey design, ugly background, splash page that doesn’t seem to serve any purpose, click counter, total lack of any logical navigation system, blinking text and much more. This site is considered the *premier* site for information on the Shroud of Turin and the ongoing research on this artifact. It’s a shame the site is so, well, sucky.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: One of the “much more” items is putting everything on one page. This is just another “Over the Top” web site without the black background.

Shroud of Turin

Eesti Muuseumide Infokeskus

Submitter’s comments: To be fair, it is in Estonian which probably won’t help your brain (although once you get past the page there is an English-language version), but the navigation is constantly moving up or across at random, and the letters on the blocks don’t even vaguely match up with the link’s title. Why do that? Once you’ve moused over all of the options, you need to figure out where the link you’ve found has moved to.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Wow! Movable Mystery Meat. It’s almost as bad as Random Mystery Meat Navigation. People aren’t going to your web site expecting to have to find the navigation. Best-selling author and animal behaviorist Temple Grandin, in her book Animals in Translation, makes the statement, “Humans are built to see what they’re expecting to see.” Humans suffer from Inattentional blindness and can’t even see what’s in front of their eyes. Your visitors are expecting to see navigation at the top, left-side, or right-side of the page. They expect to be able to read and understand the navigation.

This site also appears to have contrast issues on the internal pages.

Eesti Muuseumide Infokeskus

Historian of the Future

Submitter’s comments: Here is a web site that truly does suck. I came across it while searching for something totally unrelated and was mesmerized by it suckiness. It sucks so bad, its hard to pull your eyes away from it because there is just so much jammed together with no organization. Enjoy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Just like last Tuesday’s Daily Sucker, this site is “Over the Top.” The definition of an “Over the Top”web site is just like the definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. Over the Top sites generally deal with philosophy, religion, politics, end times, etc., but they’re generally not mainstream. These sites always make 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.”

Historian of the Future

Implosion Group – The Daily Sucker for Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Implosion Group

Submitter’s comments: This site is so crazy, I’m not sure if it falls into the suck category

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Fortunately, I have a category for this type of web site — “Over the Top.” The definition of an “Over the Top”web site is just like the definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. Over the Top sites generally deal with philosophy, religion, politics, end times, etc., but they’re generally not mainstream. These sites always make 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.”

I’ve just come up with a new theory as to why people design sites like this. They’re afraid that if they create logical navigation, nobody will click on any of the links. They want to put all their beliefs on one page on the off chance someone will scroll down and find something of interest.

Implosion Group

New Zealand Chess Supplies

Submitter’s comments: While looking for a local game supplier I came across this web site. Maybe it’s me, or maybe it’s the type of people who play chess (I was looking for backgammon supplies!), but at first glance the site is just boring. This design is homespun and unprofessional and the images look like clipart from 1993.

The whole site turns me away from purchasing anything from here. Every page seems to be formatted differently giving no consistency to the web browsing experience. Considering they are selling some fairly expensive items, like backgammon boards up to $96NZD (currently about $70USD), I would expect a better experience for my money and a feeling that I would get a product I would value.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If you click the “Welcome to our website” link on the home page (to begin with, you shouldn’t be using the message “Welcome to our website”), you’re taken to what you would logically believe to be “the site.” It’s a site map, but since the home page is so old and boring, it’s not hard to believe that this is the site. When you click on any of the links, you’re sent to a product page — but there are no prices. Worse, there’s a message at the bottom of the product page that says, “CLOSE WINDOW.” OK, but if you click it, it closes the site because when you originally clicked it didn’t open a new window. You’re closing the whole browser.

What you’re supposed to do — but have no way of knowing — is that if you want to see product prices you have to use the small navigation at the top left.

Yikes. This is horrible.

New Zealand Chess Supplies

Us District Court, Oregon

Submitter’s comments: Unmarked PDFs, a guy beating something to death with a shovel and a nice, retro 90′s feel. Last updated? 30nov09.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I love the way s/he described the cliched “Under Construction” animated GIF — “a guy beating something to death with a shovel.” Brilliant. On the other hand, the use of unmarked PDFs is really, really annoying.

Would it be too much trouble to use one background color? After all, this is a table-based home page and you just have to choose one color and change the BGCOLOR attributes.

Us District Court, Oregon

Finley’s Fun Center

Submitter’s comments: Dunno if you’ve seen this one, but it’s one of the worst web sites I’ve seen in a while. Need your speakers on for it, and also click on ‘London’ if you don’t have epilepsy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s another over-the-top web site. S/he’s right. Don’t click London if you have epilepsy. There’s nothing fun about this site.

Finley’s Fun Center

Added the current, stupid version of the WPTS home page to Stupid Versions of WPTS Home Page. I call this one the Page Peel version.

Smith & Goldsmith

Submitter’s comments: This site sucks.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I absolutely don’t understand how this happens. All anyone has to do is look at the home page and they should immediately see something’s wrong.

Oh. Get a real domain.

Smith & Goldsmith

Boink

Submitter’s comments:This web site is a business web site for… something. The Flash Splash page doesn’t help and, when you get past that, you’re treated to a face full of Mystery Meat Navigation, Flash and a really strange rotating thing of icons.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Looking at the URL — Boink.com — I was afraid I was headed toward a pig site or a porn site — or a pig porn site. Fortunately, I think, it’s a site that sells gaming machines, ATMs and other Point of Sale machines.

While I can see a use for Flash on parts of the subpages — but only to show the machines, not for text purposes — Flash is overused. Flash doesn’t seem to be helping them with the search engines. I used Google to search for [point of sale equipment] and [point of sale hardware] and they weren’t listed in the first 200 results under either term. If their site were a little more descriptive, I might have come up with a better search phrase.

You do have to give them credit for being ahead of their time. The copyright date on the home page is 2010. I also love their phone number — 1-800-GO-BOINK.

Boink