I hate forms. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, WPTS is a form-free zone. However, they’re insanely important for most sites and here’s “Best Practices in Form Design,” a free, downloadable, 133-page PDF (4.37Mb) from the guy who wrote the book on forms.

Download the PDF

Submitter’s comments: This is such an odd site. It’s part business, part personal and part political. On the business side, you actually have two businesses: reenactors sales and scuba sales.

I’m not from Mars but I’m still confused.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: So am I. This site looks like it was created in 1996, starting with the first two words on the site— “Welcome to.” Other charming elements from 1996 are the scrolling Javascript ticker at the bottom, the type of background image, the centered text, the Comic Sans font, blue border around graphic links, lack of links to the home page from the subpages, blocking right click on the Scuba page (on IE — it doesn’t work in Firefox or Chrome), horizontal rules, table borders, cheesy graphics (credit cards come to mind) and I don’t think purchases are handled using the https protocol.

BTW, the picture of the beautiful kids on the front is a link to a page that has nothing to do with these kids. Why?

Somebody needs to read my redesign checklists: Checklist 1 – Fatal Mistakes and Checklist 2 – Big Mistakes. The good news is the home page loads quickly. Page Speed gave is a 91 and Yslow gave it an 81.

Blockade Runner

I deleted Edge Entertainment because it might have an IFrame click-type Trojan that may “increase the number of visits to certain sites in order to boost the number of hits for online ads.” My browsers didn’t detect anything.

Today, April 20 — which is Hitler’s birthday — seems like a good time to talk about a disturbing trend in web design.

Read the article

An old high school buddy, Terry Schill, came up with a brilliant take about recent Twitter events: “Not bragging, but all of my Tweets are going into the Library of Congress….who would have known?”

Definitely NOT The Daily Sucker.

The best part of the Twitter deal is that everyone can now legitimately tell people, “I’m an author. My works are in the Library of Congress.”

Submitter’s comments: I found your site as part of the therapy I needed after a colleague asked, “Have you seen the med college site lately?” I’d like to draw your attention to our Medical College “redesign” in NYC.  It was bad before.  Now, I’m not quite sure what to say…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: How about saying, “It sucks.” I’m sure the graffiti on the front page means something to somebody, but that somebody isn’t me and it probably isn’t you. AccessColor says that Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 9.7% of the total text. Tsk Tsk.

I ran the site through Zoompf’s Mini Performance Assessment Tool and was informed that Cornell Medical had the following problems:

Hopefully, the full report is still up. For a sucky web page, it had low scores on Page Speed (71) and Yslow (59).

I took a look at an older version of the Cornell Med home page at Archive.org and, yes, the new site is much worse. If you click on Departments, you’ll get one of those lightboxes with all the links. Choosing “Headache Center” sends you to a page where there are no (obvious) links back to where you came from — the home page.

Weill Cornell Medical College

Submitter’s comments: Long time reader, but first time submitter. I love fishing, and I stumbled across a link to this page on a fishing forum from someone who recommended the planer bobbers.

Check out the product page.

It’s supposed to be a really good product for catfishing in rivers, but how anyone manages to stay on the page long enough to buy it without having a seizure or running away screaming I don’t know.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There are three articles (at a minimum) the designer of this site needs to read:

1. Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web – Part 1
2. Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web – Part 2
3. Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web – Part 3

The product page is breathtaking and by breathtaking I mean it’s like someone punches you in the stomach and you can’t breathe and so breathtaking is hard to do.

Besides all the graphics and text problems and everything crammed together, the music drives me crazy.

As I’ve recently theorized, crappy web sites load quickly and that will make Google happy.

Catfishing

Submitter’s comments: I have the worst page ever. Trust me and check this one out. I have seen most of the sites on your site — great site by the way — and this has to be up there.

What do you think?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s pretty bad, but it isn’t the worst site I’ve seen. The major problem, of course, is contrast. I can’t read the menu links and it’s difficult and painful to read the text. It’s unfortunate, because helping kids to read is about the most important thing you can do.

In keeping with my recent rant about sucky web sites scoring well on their page loading time, Page Speed gave the home page an 88, while Yslow gave it a 72 (which is a grade of C).

Frog Reading

Speaking of testing your site’s performance (and I have been talking about it), try Zoompf’s Free Web Performance Assessment, created by Billy Zoompf (not really, he’s Billy Hoffman but I like calling him Billy Zoompf because it reminds me of Billy Zoom from the great LA band X). Billy is one of those fricking genius kids that we all wish we were. You can see a sample report of Porn.com “with extremely tiny pixelated nakedness,” which may make it NSFW.