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

Submitter’s comments: In general, this website is an ugly 90’s-style website,
but the real kicker occurs here, where the coder forgot to close every header tag on the page.
This site just recently got a lot of attention from being featured in a Twitter tweet that was then reposted on several other sites.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What’s most impressive is that somebody spent their valuable time trying to figure out what was wrong with the page. Seriously, this is one of the more screwed-up text pages I’ve seen, but it looks “fine” in Internet Explorer. If you’re using Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Safari, then the text keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Sewing and Embroidery Warehouse

Submitter’s comments: Just how many featured articles can a home page have before none are featured? This one “features” a length of over 100 (!) pages/screens of articles going back to at least 2005. As with many really Over-the-top Websites (OTT), they love to pile it on.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If a picture is worth a thousand words, we could use about 47 pictures. Somebody has taken the phrase “web page” way too seriously. On the other hand, it doesn’t take the word “synopsis” seriously enough or it doesn’t understand the definition. Let me help them out.

You know you’re in for a fun time when you see a link entitled, “How to USE this Website.” Jokes and navigation share one thing in common: if you have to explain either one, it isn’t working.

On the other hand, for an OTT website, it looks better than most. Probably because the site eliminated the usual strobe color effects and animated GIFs.

Bolen Report

Submitter’s comments: I haven’t written to you in about a billion years, but I saw a new sub-site at Verizon today that made my eyes bleed. Enjoy becoming nauseous and jittery while viewing this!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The problems show up on a long portrait monitor. Your eye is drawn toward the numbered red squares. You instinctively mouse over them and the fly-out menus are ugly and the font is hideous. The body text is small and difficult to read because the color is #666—Satan’s CSS

Verizon is being “cute” with their navigation. If you know how the navigation works, then it’s easy to navigate.

Verizon

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I love Alistapart’s new redesign because I can read the text since the text is large with plenty of contrast. The site is following the current trend of using large font sizes (which I’ve been advocating for years). It’s not perfect. If you read Comment #22 on the A List Apart 5.0 page (I can’t provide a direct link since the comments use Ajax), you’ll see alfred’s list of deficiencies. I can live with all of them. What I can’t live with is the effing logo. It’s cut in half!

In the 18 years I’ve been commenting about bad/horrible/mediocre/semi-ok web design, I’ve seen tons of awful logos. I’ve seen logos half-way down the page, too small to read, animated, sideways, using 15 colors, on the top-right side of the page, but I’ve never seen a logo like this from people who have forgotten 10x more than I’ll ever know about web design. Jeez. What’s wrong is the logo makes me think. What’s really wrong is the logo makes me think something is wrong with the site or the browser. It’s Mistake #1 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015. You’re getting in the way of the visitor. He’s noticing the design.

Oh. Everyone’s favorite site, Constellation 7, has a logo that’s outrageous and rainbow-colored, but you aren’t surprised by it because the rest of the home page has stunned you.

A List Apart 5.0 Redesign

Submitter’s comments: There are some pages that are badly designed, and then there are pages that are just terrible. This is one of the terribly designed ones. The home page is wide, REALLY wide and you have to scroll horizontally. The text is not searchable because the text is graphics-based and most of the text is in some crazy font that isn’t readable. The navigation and legibility are just a nightmare.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I rarely ROTFALMFWAO (Roll On The Floor And Laugh My Fat White Ass Off) when I visit a website, but I rolled around when I discovered this site had disabled the right click mouse function because the site owner didn’t want any of his graphics stolen. Wow! Talk about delusions of adequacy. It’s also an insult to every gun-toting visitor to the site—a website thinking that their visitors don’t know how to disable JavaScript to get the images. Of course, who would want them?

If you ever wondered where all the beveled text on the Internet ended up after everyone stopped using this technique, it ended up on this website. Jeez Louise. This technique stopped before my site started in July 1996.

On the plus side, most of the text on many of the pages is readable—but then there’s the “Questions” page.

High Noon Holsters