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

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I received a newsletter about all these cool new websites. As soon as I see words like “cool” or any other superlative like “amazing” or “inspirational” I know I’m going to find Daily Sucker material.

I thought Flip-Universum was a Flash-based site until I looked at the source code. It’s all HTML5 trickery. I’m really impressed with the talent it took to create this home page. Really, really impressed. Unfortunately, the website sucks. The home page takes a long, long time to load (10 seconds according to WebPageTest) and clocks in at almost 5Mb. It took over a minute to load on my iPhone 4.

Of course, I can’t pass mentioning the Mystery Meat Navigation that permeates the page. On my iPhone, the mouseover doesn’t work the way it does on the desktop, which means your cool effect is wasted.

Yes, there are navigation bars at the top so you can skip the cutesy animation, but they’re wasted. Your eye goes to the animation and you get sucked into a black hole. I was so enchanted by the animations I didn’t stop and find out what this company or organization or whatever does. I think that defeats the purpose of having a website.

Flip-Universum