Website similarities seems to be a popular topic this week. First, we had Jakob Nielsen weigh in with Should You Copy a Famous Site’s Design? and then I discovered Copycat Design.

Here are three examples I’ve been using for a long time.

1. A big screenshot of some sites with a similar look.
2. A video I made on the topic.
3. A screen capture of similar legal statements. Yes, these examples are old but, if I remember correctly, these legal statements were used until fairly recently.

Submitter’s comments: It’s been a while since I’ve seen Mystery Meat Navigation used on a website, so I thought I’d send you this site. Honestly, I don’t see this much any more — see if you can find the navigation on this page (hint: it is next to the little graphic that says “Navigate” and has an arrow pointing to it. Even then, it takes a moment to realize what the heck is going on).

I was floored that I couldn’t just click what appeared to be the “Lunch” or “Dinner” graphics at the top. The music which plays when the page loads is also one of my biggest pet peeves.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Whenever someone says to you,”There’s nothing wrong with using Mystery Meat Navigation,” send them to this site. I hereby revoke my Mystery Meat exemption to band, art, personal, music, et al. sites until such a time as site owners and designers become responsible citizens. If people see something stupid, they want it. This has got to stop.

Zinc Bistro

The HTML 5 Test is a really cool site that tells you how much HTML 5 support is built into your browser. With Apple screaming “We have the best HTML 5 support” I thought it would be logical to visit The HTML 5 Test and see who’s the real winner.

I went on Monday, June 7, the day Safari 5 was released. I went back on Tuesday and discovered that the test had been revised. The original test had 160 possible points, while the current test (released on Wednesday) has 300. I’ve broken the tests down by New (300 point scale) and Old (160 point scale). The score does not include bonus points

Google can claim they beat Apple and offer better HTML 5 support, but that’s if you’re using the 6.0 developer version, which most of you shouldn’t be using.

Apple can claim they beat Google and offer better HTML 5 support with the current stable releases, which is probably a more accurate claim.

The truth is support is still pretty crappy. Speaking of crap, Microsoft’s IE 7 and 8 are POS when it comes to HTML 5. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know IE 9 is so much better, but nobody in their right mind would test it on their production machine. That’s assuming their production machine isn’t running XP because IE 9 won’t work on XP.

I’m too curious. I installed the IE 9 Platform Preview on my Vista laptop. IE 9 isn’t really a browser, but more of an HTML viewer. For one thing, you can install it alongside another version of IE. That’s really, really difficult to do in the real world.

As you see in the scores above, IE 9′s HTML 5 support is less than IE 8, but greater than IE 7. I’m not impressed. Here’s a screenshot showing the new, still limited support.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: When you’re young, you talk about the drugs you take. When you’re old, you talk about the medicine you’re taking. Once of the problems with taking medicine when you’re older is that you forget whether you’ve taken your pills or not — especially when you take several different medicines.

King 5 TV ran a news story about a new type of medicine cap that tells you how long it’s been since you’ve opened that particular medicine. They mentioned that local drug store chain (Bartell Drugs) would have the product available and that it was available from the manufacturer.

I looked at a lot of pages at Bartell’s site , but couldn’t find a search engine. Using the Google Toolbar, I searched the site, but only found one link and the link wasn’t helpful.

When I went to RX Timer Cap’s web site (the manufacturer of the product) and clicked the Buy button, I was greeted with the message “Page Under Development.”

Holy Mother of God. Do these morons realize how frustrating this is? I want your product but you won’t let me order it.

Obviously, there will come the day when they solve this problem (I hope). Here’s a video to memorialize the fact they’re Unclear on the Concept.

RX Timer Cap

I’ve got pneumonia. ‘Nuff said.

Xerox

Submitter’s comments: There are too many web sites I can’t really read because the text isn’t dark enough. I’m older (63) with some eye problems, but I spend large sums of money on products for my company that I research on the web. I’d at least like to be able to read about what I’m buying. I find Xerox’s home page difficult to read. If you mouse over the “Document Outsourcing” link at the top, you get black text on a dark purple background.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The harder it is to read a web page the easier it becomes for your visitors to hit the BACK button and go to a site they can read. In order to read a web page, you need enough contrast between the text color and the background color. This isn’t rocket science. I’ll even  give you a simple guide that shows which shades of black to use for text on a white background.

Why do designers do that voodoo that they do so well? In an article entitled, Has Your Web Designer Ever Heard of Contrast? a plausible explanation is given:

The reason is… gray text looks better and more coherentwhen seen from a distance or as an element of the overall design, but, and this is a big but, it is not meant to be read in these cases…

…Unfortunately, some visual designers sacrifice readability for a slight increase in visual appeal because they do not really read the text on screen; they treat it as a large block of horizontal lines, and the darker those lines are the uglier they look. So, decreasing the contrast a little makes the overall design look nicer but less readable. Poor readability is not the designer’s problem. After all, he will probably never try to use the site he designed.

I noted that a recent Daily Sucker, TechSoup, was using #666 for some of their text, which made it difficult to read. I noticed that today’s sucker, Xerox, also uses #666 for sections of their text. As the submitter mentioned, mousing over the “Document Outsourcing” link is not pleasant. It gets worse. The Xerox for Small and Medium Businesses page adds hard-to-read link colors.

It seemed to me like important web sites were all conspiring at the same time. Perhaps I felt this way because A&E and the History Channel have been running shows about the end of the world with predictions from Nostradamus, the Aztecs, and everybody and his brother and watched too many of them (I’m not watching anything political.)

Then it hit me. The number 666 is the Number of the Beast. This is all coming to me as a revelation on…9-9-9, which is “666″ inverted. Yes, Nostraflanders has uncovered a plot on this special day to ruin web sites. #666 is Satan’s CSS! If you don’t believe me, look at the photo above. This is proof!

In the movie The Usual Suspects, the character Verbal Kint says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

At Web Pages That Suck, Nostraflanders says, “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing web designers the people could read text colored #666.”

Xerox

Sonic

Submitter’s comments: Avid reader here. I was hungry and looking for something to eat for lunch. I wandered on over to sonicdrivein.com and was amazed at how crappy the web site was.

First off, it takes a long time to load. Let’s face it, if I’m looking up food on the internet, chances are I’m hungry and don’t want to sit there and waste precious time waiting for a page to load.

The site has a lot of Flash stuff and those two annoying guys on the commercials pop up and basically nag you to death while you are deciding what to do. I hate sites that talk to you.

The background on the site is a large picture, which makes it hard to distinguish other page elements. If you click on the “explore menu” a big menu comes up and you move it around with your cursor. I tried it for a few seconds and got a headache. There is an option for the “quick view” menu, if you can find the tab at the top of the page. The contrast of the text against the red headers is terrible.

There is just way too many cutesy, gimmicky things on this site for my taste. I think restaurants should be pretty straight-forward in their web presentations. This is who we are, this is what we have for you to eat, and this is when we are open. That’s pretty much all I want to see.

Thanks for giving me something to read and laugh at everyday.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The site is even worse if you have a large portrait monitor. Flash, of course, fills up the window. In general, that’s a good idea and one of the reasons people use Flash, but on my monitor the home page sucks. Oh, and this particular screen (they rotate) scared the bejesus out of me.

With its horizontal scrolling, the Flash menu page is out of control. The site also has Mystery Meat Navigation, and Mystery Meat is the last thing you want to see at a restaurant. Well, I suspect the last thing you want to see is a Health Inspector shaking his head in disgust. Speaking of Health Inspectors, here’s a report on my favorite eating spot in Bellevue, Washington — Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Oops.

Sonic

I’m actually a really nice person, but I’m getting really, really upset that some web sites can’t handle simple typos. I went to Pollstar to find out if the Drive By Truckers were playing anywhere near me. In the search box I quickly typed “Drive By Truckersd” and hit the ENTER key before I realized my fingers had accidentally hit the “d” key. Here’s the screenshot of what resulted.

C’mon, geniuses. I got every letter right except the last one. How hard is it to figure out what I wanted. What about people who type “Drive Bye Truhkers?” Yes, I’m stupid for making a mistake, but you didn’t keep my original search term in the search box. If you did, I could just go up and hit backspace to erase the “d” and then hit enter and get my results.

Amazon knows how to handle my mistake. The clowns at Pollstar don’t.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I ran across an interesting blog post concerning web design. The article’s title, Hey, did you want to try Netflix? How about while you’re already using Netflix? tells you all you really need to know. These are the types of usability issues that just drive you crazy.

I’m working on a post about an even worse experience. I get most of my prescriptions online because I get more pills for less money. I recently went online, ordered some medicine, went through all the steps, and at the end of the process I discover — via some small text — that they won’t let me buy the medicine because my prescription had lapsed. IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LET ME BUY SOMETHING, DON’T LET ME ORDER IT! I’m still upset.