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

Submitter’s comments: Ownerterms.com is part of a ring of real estate web sites, all with similar designs and all with the same problems. The main page is too wide for my Macbook’s 1280×800 screen. Add the garish colors and oversized text, and you have a mess. Oh, and don’t get me started on the messy, outdated code.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Obviously, if it doesn’t fit in our submitter’s 1280×800 screen, it isn’t going to fit in my 1200×1700 screen. The good news is you can read the text. The bad news is a couple of weeks ago, Google sent out emails to websites that weren’t mobile friendly and on their PageSpeed insights page they said this page “…may not pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Oh, the home page’s mobile score was 44/100 and the desktop score was 67/100. See the screenshot below for how the page shows up on mobile devices.Click the image to see the site as Google sees it.

I’m going to give you a warning you need to heed: If you don’t fix your websites to be mobile friendly in 2015, Google will come down HARD on your site’s search engine rankings.

Owner Terms

Submitters’ comments: Let’s get it all on the front page, shall we? Despite using the Microsoft program to make the page, why put so much on the cover page? Even James Joyce had an editor and this site needs to be sliced, diced, and organized into usable bits.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There are also a lot of the usual type issues: mutli-colored, inconsistent use of color on text (H1 and H2 tags with same color), justified and flush-left text, etc.

On Camera

Submitters’ comments: Here you go…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This website is where badly created, cheesy animated GIFs go to die.

This website is part of what I can “Cliche Web Design” or “1997 Web Design.” It would like to be 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.“ Actually, I should have said, “Have you ever seen a hotel website before?

This may be the worst looking hotel website on the internet. I’ll leave it to you to try and find one worse.

Exmouth View Hotel

Submitters’ comments: At first glance, it seems okay, but there’s no way to tell that the pages have anything going on below the fold. The pictures cut people’s heads off, there are sometimes up to six barely web-safe font families on a page.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Once again, another big issue is contrast—or lack of it. If you scroll to the bottom where most of the links are located and you’ll see they’re hard to read. Your visitors have to be able to read the text.

There’s a carousel showcasing different teachers. When I moused over the teachers my cursor changed to indicate this was a link. It wasn’t. None of them were. They were Mystery Meat cards that, when moused over, told you about the person. I know it’s not easy to solve this problem (JavaScript is the culprit, I suspect), but you’re a big-time school with what looks like a big-time website. sweat the details.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights wasn’t impressed with the speed of the site, giving the mobile version a score of 39 and the desktop version a score of 58.

St. Joseph’s College New York

Submitters’ comments:
It’s terrible. It’s hard to read. The color scheme looks like and makes you want to vomit. I understand the outdoors is “green,” but for God’s sakes man.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The contrast—or lack of—is just wrong, wrong, wrong I especially like the centered, left-centered, and right-centered text within only three paragraphs!

The site is 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 anti-psychotics in a while school of web design.”

Swift Nature Camp