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

Submitter’s comments: iPearl is source page for mCover, and produce third party covers and protective cases for laptops, e-readers, and so on.

My main objection, apart from the fact that the page looks like it was designed 15 years ago and never updated, is the fact that it WAS updated and yet looks poos. Most of the low quality images of the devices they provide covers for has a mouse-over with some information and more low quality images of the same products. And by low quality I mean they seem to have stripped the colour depth out of the pictures for some reason so instead of gentle shading they you see spots of different shades . There is drop-down box in the top right to let you jump straight to a product, in my case Amazon Kindle, and lo! there are further web pages with animated gifs in low quality images, and far too much text.

I was going to pull this email and not send it once I saw, hidden at the top of the home page, a link for their new site (umm, whatever happened to redirects?). But then I looked at it too.

While it does look better the same low quality images are there, among a few more fundamental errors, like showing the wrong product in the image (there is a Kindle 2 in the picture for a Kindle 3 product).

Biggest issues with these sites:

• Low quality images
• Text in images (why? why put text in an image and then shrink the image? WHY?)
• Animated gifs
• Terrible text colour choice
• Overall design

And, why, if there is a new site that is intended to take over from the old site, isn’t the old site decommissioned and a redirect put in place?

I think they just don’t seem to be marketing themselves very well at all. I will admit they seem to have learned a bit between the iPearl-inc site and the mCover site, but it’s still not great, and there are some fundamental problems they haven’t fixed.

Personally I’d not give them my money until they correct the rest of their web issues.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is a stereotypical situation. The company—which probably makes/sells good products—has a website that gives the impression they make/sell crap. If it’s not Rule #1, it’s close to it—people want to do business with people who look professional.

I’d also add that there are serious text contrast issues.

mCover (old site)

mCover (new site)