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

Submitter’s comments: This one reminds me of old GeoCities sites from about 1997. It’s painful to look at, thanks to the total lack of contrast (black on dark blue? yellow on greenish?), the blinking things make me want to hurt my browser, and they have no clue what “anti-aliasing” could possibly mean, nor why something anti-aliased for a white background should not be put on that blue … stuff.

It’s quite a large site, and every page is more hideous than the last. There are imagemaps for no good reason, graphicized text to make sure search engines can’t see the navigation and things in the source code that make me cringe…empty links galore, that kind of thing. And these people are selling to multi-million-dollar clients.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Normally, I might say “Oh, nobody uses their website because they have a catalog and that’s what people use. Wrong. They have a “No printed catalog is available” message at the bottom of the page. Oh, they underscore the message—which is wrong because only links should be underscored. The copyright is from 1997-2012. I think the submitter is right. The site is stuck in 1997.

This is a real company with a really bad website—one that is awfully close to being a Loon Website.

The site is trying to be cute by redirecting folks. If you want to see the site:

1. Copy this url — http://www.pnwx.com/
2. Open new tab or window in your browser
3. Paste in the URL
4. Hit the ENTER key

Or if you want to read the diatribe – Pacific Northwest X-ray. I haven’t read it because I’ve heard it all before <grin>.