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

Submitter’s comments: I just had the interesting experience of trying to find a pair of glasses on the Alfred Sung website. I lasted about three mouse clicks into the site and then was too puzzled to continue, so I thought I’d send the site to you instead. Here is yet another example of not only confusing Mystery Meat Navigation, but also a useless, pointless, unnecessarily annoying Flash menu system. Really? You needed Flash for this?

All I wanted was to complete a simple task: look at their catalogue of frames to see if I could find a replacement for the pair of Alfred Sung glasses that I used to own and loved and happened to accidentally destroy last week. I have a general idea of the design I want (in fact, I even had a model number on the old frames that I was hoping I could look up). I expected I could go to their site and say, “Hey, show me all the women’s half-frames you’ve got and I’ll probably give you some money.” As a bonus, I was hoping they might even tell me what retailers in my geographic region carried their frames. The site didn’t really allow me to do any of that.

I have no idea what all those little square buttons on the main site are for and why they are just showing me random pictures of models instead of telling me something useful, and I can’t really be bothered to click on them all to find out. After a moment or two I realized there’s a tiny little, not-well contrasted link on the bottom right saying “Collections”. Call me crazy but if you’re selling eyeglasses your clientele probably doesn’t see very well and you might want to make your text easier to find and read. So I clicked on “Collections” and got… something? I think this is a perfume ad on a eyewear website? I thought I was going to get some eyeglasses collection?

According to that ad, I must be in love with Alfred Sung… well maybe, but I’m definitely not in love with their site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The Mystery Meat Navigation on Sung’s home page is really, really awful. As the submitter stated, Flash is used on the home page and my Firefox browser is set up to not display Flash, so there’s nothing.

As the submitter correctly noted, the site isn’t useful. It’s really just a badly built advert.

Alfred Sung Eyewear