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

Submitter’s comments: Check out this sucky site!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Definitely a contender for worst web site of 2010. My first reaction was “Where’s the white space?”

Shop in Paradise

Submitter’s comments: It’s been a while since I’ve seen Mystery Meat Navigation used on a website, so I thought I’d send you this site. Honestly, I don’t see this much any more — see if you can find the navigation on this page (hint: it is next to the little graphic that says “Navigate” and has an arrow pointing to it. Even then, it takes a moment to realize what the heck is going on).

I was floored that I couldn’t just click what appeared to be the “Lunch” or “Dinner” graphics at the top. The music which plays when the page loads is also one of my biggest pet peeves.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Whenever someone says to you,”There’s nothing wrong with using Mystery Meat Navigation,” send them to this site. I hereby revoke my Mystery Meat exemption to band, art, personal, music, et al. sites until such a time as site owners and designers become responsible citizens. If people see something stupid, they want it. This has got to stop.

Zinc Bistro

Submitter’s comments: I have found a pretty sucky site you might be interested in. Champ’s Rollerdrome is a local skate rink. To start with, their header graphic is overly large, obnoxiously frenetic, unnecessarily Flash and on every page! There’s also plenty of poor contrast text and jumpy link buttons. And check out their birthday page (if you can find it) to see how many trademarked logos they’re using.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The page might cause seizures, so beware. I was expecting a low-end type of site, but this is a mid-level ugly Flash site.

Champs Entertainment Complex

Submitter’s comments: I really, really wanted this website to have some sort of meaning other than slowing down my computer. But it just didn’t deliver…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Looking for meaning from a website is like looking for true love in a bar. This site may be NSFW — but mostly for the background music and cheesy animations. My only hope is this site is where cheesy animations go to die.

Disco of the Night

Submitter’s comments: On a guitar newsgroup the topic of worst websites came up. Most of the examples were sites you’ve featured years ago (Yvette’s, Forever Forgiven, etc.) that people think “they’ve discovered.” One site that was new to me — and shouldn’t have been — is Ed Roman Guitars. It’s definitely Web Pages That Suck material.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There’s nothing like a Las Vegas-style website belonging to a Las Vegas-based company. It certainly qualifies for my list of Over-The-Top Web Sites except this site isn’t about “philosophy, religion, politics, end times, etc.”

Yes, it’s a music site (which are normally exempt), but it’s a store that sells products. This site is a classic example of Mistake #6 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.”

Seriously, have the people at this company surfed the web?

Ed Roman Guitar

Submitter’s comments: The best ice cream in the country – but the worst web page. I think Blue Bell Ice Cream’s latest main page redesign sucks. I have to hover over everything to find what I’m looking for.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: God Almighty. If there’s one thing that’s been my downfall in life (in the food category), it has been ice cream. If there’s one thing that’s this site’s downfall, it’s Mystery Meat Navigation (not a food category).

The site seems to start out nicely. The cute little girl seems OK, but the “enter site” link looks like it’s connected to the “log in” and “sign up” links. Do I have to register to use an ice cream site? Actually, no. It’s somewhat confusing. If you take the time to scroll down the page, you’ll see there’s a full set of text navigation. Most people aren’t going to scroll.

Clicking the “enter site” link takes you to the Mystery Meat. Yes, it’s well done and it looks nice, but so what? Navigation is supposed to help you get from Point A to Point B.

God help me. One of their brands is Peaches & Homemade Vanilla. I’m doomed.

Blue Bell Ice Cream

The HTML 5 Test is a really cool site that tells you how much HTML 5 support is built into your browser. With Apple screaming “We have the best HTML 5 support” I thought it would be logical to visit The HTML 5 Test and see who’s the real winner.

I went on Monday, June 7, the day Safari 5 was released. I went back on Tuesday and discovered that the test had been revised. The original test had 160 possible points, while the current test (released on Wednesday) has 300. I’ve broken the tests down by New (300 point scale) and Old (160 point scale). The score does not include bonus points

Google can claim they beat Apple and offer better HTML 5 support, but that’s if you’re using the 6.0 developer version, which most of you shouldn’t be using.

Apple can claim they beat Google and offer better HTML 5 support with the current stable releases, which is probably a more accurate claim.

The truth is support is still pretty crappy. Speaking of crap, Microsoft’s IE 7 and 8 are POS when it comes to HTML 5. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know IE 9 is so much better, but nobody in their right mind would test it on their production machine. That’s assuming their production machine isn’t running XP because IE 9 won’t work on XP.

I’m too curious. I installed the IE 9 Platform Preview on my Vista laptop. IE 9 isn’t really a browser, but more of an HTML viewer. For one thing, you can install it alongside another version of IE. That’s really, really difficult to do in the real world.

As you see in the scores above, IE 9′s HTML 5 support is less than IE 8, but greater than IE 7. I’m not impressed. Here’s a screenshot showing the new, still limited support.

Submitter’s comments: Ewww. Mere words cannot adequately describe this atrocity. You will need speakers to fully appreciate this…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Looks like a cheap template with cheap Flash. Speaking of cheap Flash, Adobe warns of critical Flash-based security hole.

God, how I hate the music (it’s been playing for the last 10 minutes because I’m writing this article) and there’s no mute button. The text is too small, the contrast is poor, the logo is on the right side instead of the left (and this logo makes no sense), and the subpages have some strange Flash thingy that is supposed to make you think you’re flying. You’re not.

Leoair

Sorry about yesterday’s link. It’s fixed. It should have been Smart Security Solutions

Submitter’s comments: I was searching for corporate security vendors and came across these guys. The front page is awful enough just from the misguided background and barcode themes they present.

Add to that a horrible 1995-era text scroll, a PDF file as a primary menu link, a quote builder built in Flash that doesn’t resize in Firefox (doesn’t even work in Chrome), a personal message link to the owner’s PARENTS on the contact page (complete with copies of the parents previous e-mails), badly overemphasized text, references to supposed clients that are not referencing anything more than their names, broken image links, floating links with nothing contained within them, and a dozen other problems I just don’t have time to note. And, yes, crazy as it seems, this is a legitimate company.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It appears that the copy on the home page was written by someone partially familiar with the English language, but who was intimately familiar with Microsoft FrontPage (may it rest in peace). They’re also not familiar with contrast because 13% of the page’s text lacks it.

The Quote Builder tool has lots of problems in Firefox. The biggest problem is that the tool is so tiny. Seriously. This screen capture shows the Quote Builder as it’s displayed in Google Chrome. Inside of this screen capture is how the whole page appears in Firefox. It’s tiny, tiny, tiny.

I couldn’t find anything about the owner’s parents because I couldn’t find the contact page. I’m assuming there is one, but who knows?

It’s also not a good idea to use “Home” as your TITLE tag. Whatever the Java animation is on the home page, it isn’t working. Darn.

As you might suspect, Google’s concern about page speed won’t hurt this sucky site. Google’s Page Speed gives it an 86, while Yslow is a more realistic 78 and Zoompf gives it what I believe to be a more accurate score of 67.63.

Smart Security Solutions