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

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.

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