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

Gee, you would think that companies who specialize in making other websites better would be paragons of good web design techniques. You would think they would follow their own guidelines. Some do and some don’t.

Shouldn’t Web Optimization Companies Own Sites Be Optimized?

Gee. That’s pretty logical, right? Being the clever little boy that I am, I just had to run three popular optimization-type tests on some companies that provide page/site optimization services. What do the results mean? Heck if I know. I just gather information, I leave interpretations up to others.

Shouldn’t Web Optimization Companies Own Sites Be Optimized?

Submitter’s comments: A bad website.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Succinct.

Just another poorly constructed restaurant site. I’m especially fond of the fact that the first menu item on the left is blocked. Not all the graphics are links. Some are and some aren’t, which is very confusing.

Marvelous Muggs

Submitter’s comments: A website belonging to a company that has an unfortunate name. Oh, the site sucks, too.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yeah, it’s a bad name. If it were my company, I’d change the name to Assman Equipment, Inc. I know it’s a cliche, but here I go anyway, “Hey, 1995 called and they want their website back.”

I guess what’s confusing is the URL is missioncaseih.com.

Assman Implement, Inc.

Submitter’s comments: I love the repeated green ‘leaf’ pattern in the navigation area. The two links deemed to deserve the little red ball decoration are ‘Home’ and, of course, ‘Unmatched Stability’. Also, what more does a customer need to know about the ‘Tree Waterer’ besides what the packaging looks like?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What I love most is the tree stand graphic to the right. They’ve taken a 1.34Mb graphic that’s 2550 x 3300 pixels and scaled it down to 530 x 712 pixels. I don’t know if they think that changing their height= and width= attributes of the IMG tag would also change the physical size of the file but, as we all know, it doesn’t. I ran it through Adobe Fireworks and got the file down to around 63Kb. They make the same mistake on other pages.

The rest of the site is as the submitter commented. It would be nice to read the links on something other than a laptop.<grin> Oh, for some reason the links don’t work on my iPhone.

Cinco Plastics

Submitter’s comments: OMG

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’m headed out to see Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at the Tractor Tavern, so I’m putting this up a little early.

We either have a radio station with a religious bent or a church with a radio bent. That’s part of the problem—focus—as in “Where’s the focus?” There are multiple churches listed and some businesses that seem to be secular. Because of the URL, I’m going to guess it’s a radio station, but even that’s confusing. The URL says VERN1530, but the logo says KVDW 1530. Huh?

VERN1530AM