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

Submitter’s comments: I just stumbled on http://www.laeuft.de.  Nice site, if it was a printed leaflet for a fashion label. Unfortunately, on the first glance it looks to be in Flash (which it isn’t, the truth is much more scary than that), and what looks first like Mystery Meat Navigation turns out not to be a usable navigation system at all. No, you do not get to the next page, as there are no real pages, just this images animation, and navigating with these “things”, you only see a part of the site, because some “content” is in between those stopping points.

Fortunately, they tell you on the first “page” how to see their entire site: You should just scroll down to see more and to get the images go forward. This could be a challenge when using a notebook or an mouse without a scroll wheel, for keyboard scrolling seems to be disabled, and there are neither scrollbars or other  navigational elements. So I really had to plug in a scrollwheel mouse to get through. This nearly beats random mystery meat navigation, don’t you think?

When taking a look into the code, I was a little shocked to see this is not Flash, not a single bit of it. All these breathtaking animations really are made by plain HTML and  jQuery image sliders. And the main reason why there is no working navigation is: there are no different pages. It is just one single page, with JavaScript, CSS and  jQuery singling out what content you actually see. Which is technically kind of brilliant if you have search engines in mind (everything here is clearly indexable. Maybe that could even compensate the complete lack of relevant metadata like description or keywords). They really are using the latest cutting edge web technology.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I agree. It’s pretty impressive. It’s a bit easier to use on a mobile device. You just swipe left or right. I can’t seem to find any internal links on the mobile or desktop. Is this a brochure?

Laeuft