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

Submitters’ comments: Visit the web design past with this Italian “medical” site, which also uses FrontPage. I strongly suspect some (pejorative term deleted), if not OTT (over-the-top). On site pages are often very long (20 or more screens’ worth). The top menu seems to take you to either more pages on the site or other sites, but not in any uniform way. Have at it.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s in Italian, but since I use Google Chrome as my browser I had Google Translate’s function translate into English because like most Americans, I only know one language. It’s definitely an Over-The-Top website and not just because it’s talks about alternative medicine. It’s a classic example of Mistake #6 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.“ I call this type of design the “I haven’t taken my antipsychotics in a while school of web design.” Maybe it’s just a terminally fatal case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

Oh, before you go to the site, check out the screen below:

The Web of Trust plugin does NOT like the site at all. It told me that it has an unsatisfactory score for Trustworthiness (2/5 score) and Child Safety (2/5 score). Caveat emptor. I think we can consider it a design flaw <grin>.

As expected with this type of site we have text problems—but fewer than is “normal” for an OTT website. We have both flush-left and centered text on the page and some links are in bold and others aren’t. He uses TABLEs with borders.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights, whose goal is to “Make your web pages fast on all devices,” doesn’t think much about their home page. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test thinks even less with the page because it flunks their test.

If you are the purveyor of an alternative medicine site and want to look like you know what you’re doing, go to The Food Babe’s site. For those of you who are unaware of her, she’s the object of ridicule in the scientific, medical and nutritional communities who practice conventional medicine. No comments about whether she is or is not practicing woo. Of course, going to her site brings up a Web of Trust popup window. She’s viewed slightly more positive than Mednet.org, scoring 3/5 on both Trustworthiness and Child Safety. I view her more positively because her site gives the appearance of competence.

Mednat.org