The Daily Sucker

Submitter comments: Here’s one for you.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is a perfectly wonderful example of “Where’s the Focus?” OK, what is the focal point? Beats me. My eye is drawn toward the yellow “Test Takers e-Testing Login” button. I don’t think that’s really the focal point. There are too many items that are randomly scattered over the page.

The site’s tagline is “Measuring Critical Thinking Worldwide.” My critical thinking says your site sucks like an inverted tornado.

Insight Assessment

Submitter comments: I was just shown this site by an executive in a non-profit organization.  Of course, he thinks it’s the greatest site he’s ever seen, but you may take a dimmer view.

First off, it uses Flash exclusively so there are no pages to bookmark or search via Google.  But the real crime is the way it tries to artificially pump excitement into what are rather drab ideas.  After waiting for a slow-loading video, you are rewarded with a man saying “Hello, and welcome to the site,” and not much else.

The site is designed for a 1280 x 1024 monitor and does not scale to fit smaller screens.  At one point, I had to scroll around just to find the button that would let me return to a previous place in the site.

And for a site aimed at families and youth, its stark, mostly black design scheme seems friendly to neither.  In all, just another showy site that delights clients but annoys and confuses the reader.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think the person submitting the site is too nice. This site is a festering pus sore on the soul of web design.

The text and links are hidden unless you click the “X” on the apple. Of course, it took a while for me to notice it. I tried clicking lots of other places first, with no luck. In my version of Firefox, I have all sorts of Flash- and ad-blocker add-ins which look like they kill the menus. There’s nothing for me to click.

Oh. Let’s not forget that the TITLE tag on this site is useless for search engine optimization.

Family Youth Professional Partnership

Submitter comments: Came across this site looking for information about VLT (video lottery terminals). The website’s address is constantly flashing up at the top of the subpages (like Video Lottery) There’s a space motif for which there’s no logical reason, we have centered and flush-left text, and the site hasn’t been updated since June 2006.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The site may have been updated in 2006, but I suspect the updates were minor. The home page has a message that the site is optimized for Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4 and the heyday of those programs was a long, long time ago — IE 4 was released in September 1997. Guess what? This site looks like it was designed in 1997.

Caracolor

Submitter comments: City of 3,000 located just south of conservative Cincinnati, OH.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, it’s Halloween and this site certainly scared the bejesus out of me. I find it somewhat amusing that the web site infers that Halloween is between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. The site is pretty much of a wreck and I can only hope that the new “hub” site will be an improvement. I hope they only play music on Halloween.

One thing that annoys me about government websites is how they throw figures around like they’re important. On the History page, they mention that back in 1926, houses in the town were selling for $10,000. The implication it looks like they’re trying to make is that $10,000 back then equals a really large sum of money today. Nope. I fed the data into the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis “What is a dollar worth?” calculator and discovered that $10,000 in 1926 translates into only $117,118.64 in 2007. I suspect that $117,000 doesn’t buy you much of a house — even in Park Hills, Kentucky.

Park Hills, Kentucky

Submitter comments: (Just the URL)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I never know what I’m going to find when the subject line of an email is “It sucks” and the only text is a URL. About half the time there really isn’t much wrong with the site. The other half of the time the site sucks the oxygen out of a room.

This site is a little different. The first sign that it’s going to suck is that it uses Metaphor Navigation — in this case, the metaphor is a desk. I don’t need to tell my audience that if there ever was a hackneyed metaphor it’s Desk Metaphor Navigation. I love all the Mystery Meat books in the bookshelf — itself, another cliche. On the other hand, the author is quite prolific.

I thought the navigation at the top would match the Metaphor Navigation, but it doesn’t and that’s why this site is a Daily Sucker. The author obviously is successful and has money to burn. This site could have been much more effective for far less money.

Julie Garwood

Submitter comments: Have I found a website for you.  The place is called Mahogany’s Coffeehouse & Bar.  Their website is www.mahoganyslive.com  This has got to be one of the worst websites that I have ever seen.

When you first click to visit the site, an image of the bar appears and you have to click to enter the site.  If you stay long enough on this page and scroll down a calendar of events page finally loads beneath the picture.

The menu page is absolutely unreadable.  They used a script font and then saved it as a picture and placed it on the site.  I have no idea what they serve.

They have not checked out their cross-browser compatibility.  For the site that it is, the placement looks okay in Internet Explorer, but check it out in Firefox.  Nothing is where is should be.  Everything is all screwed and nothing is where is should be.  I haven’t checked it out in Opera or Netscape, but I would bet it is screwed up there.

This should win a prize for the worst web site ever.  Someone should seriously redesign their site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s pretty easy to check what your site looks like in different browsers. I checked out this site’s home page using BrowserCam and here’s what the site looks like. I only checked it in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome on Windows because I didn’t want you to wade through over 125 different combinations of browsers and operating systems.

It’s even easier to fix the stupid Splash page. Delete it. You don’t need a splash page. I’m amazed that my system has the script font that’s used on the Menu page. It truly is unreadable.

What’s going to be impossible to fix is the code used to generate this site. It’s straight out of Microsoft Publisher 10. I think there’s a special place in hell reserved for the Microsoft employees who created the Publisher-to-HTML conversion feature. Take a look at what passes for code. If I were a programmer and I produced crap like this, I’d go start a coffee shop.

Another problem I discovered with Firefox is that the home page downloads about a billion CSS files that have something to do with the calendar. This is even worse programming than my Microsoft example. Yikes.

Mahogany’s Coffeehouse & Bar

Submitter comments: See below.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The bad news: somehow, I “lost” the email. The good news: The content was easy to remember. Yale University didn’t read Does My Web Site Suck? Checklist 1 and has a “Welcome To” message on their home page.

No web site needs a “Welcome To” message, but Yale? Everybody knows they’re welcome to your web site. That’s why you have one. They’ve already made a commitment when they clicked on a link or typed in the URL. You don’t have to sell them. That’s one of the reasons splash pages (like Sucker #2, below) make no sense. You don’t need to seduce them into exploring your site further. They’ve taken the bait.

Before the folks over at Harvard start yelling, “We don’t need no stinking ‘Welcome To’ message,” I’d like to point out that it’s in your TITLE tag. Tsk Tsk. What Harvard really needs is someone who understands DNS. While http://www.harvard.edu gets you to their site, http://harvard.edu/doesn’t.

Yale University