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

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Periodically, I’ll take a look at an old Daily Sucker to see if it’s been fixed. Often, they’re fixed. Often, bad elements are just shuffled around like deck chairs on the Titanic. I originally featured Virginia Stucco almost 10 years ago when it had 17, 159 visitors. Ten years later there have been 29,451 visitors. If you just saw 29,451, you wouldn’t know if that number were good or bad. It’s bad because it means a little over 3.5 people per day visited the site. On the other hand, if they all bought something, it might not be bad. As I often say, “It depends.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the 2001 and 2011 versions of the site. You can see that, for the most part, they rearranged deck chairs.

Virginia Stucco

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The State of Utah’s new HackTML5-based web site is interesting. It’s a marginal Daily Sucker, but it provides an opportunity for us to learn from websites that cost lots of money and are cutting edge. I call it HackTML5 instead of HTML5 because you have to use all sorts of hacks to make HTML5 work. Then again, almost any HTML is hacked to some extent (thank you, Microsoft Internet Exploder).

If I scroll down the home page In Google Chrome, I can’t get the bottom menu to stay in place like I can with Firefox 4.

There are a lot of behind-the-scenes issues. Yslow gives it an F (40) while Page Speed gives it a 74. (Page Speed always grades on the curve. Earlier versions were tougher than Yslow, but now they’re pussycats. BTW, 40 is the lowest score I’ve ever seen. Even the ridiculously crazed format of TechCrunch gets a 48.) The site isn’t using the asynchronous version of Google Analytics, tsk tsk. There are 15 separate Javascript files and 4 external stylesheets. Here’s a screenshot of the Yslow report.

The material on the “Highlights” page scrolls too quickly. I read at a reasonable speed (I yam a kollege gradiate), but I can’t keep up.

Clicking on “Highlights” or “in Utah” or “News” brings up a scrolling DIV. It’s a nice concept, but it doesn’t work that well on my iPad. Why does that matter, because they have a file called ipad.js that’s supposed to make the site work on an iPad. It doesn’t quite get it right. Here’s what they say their site looks like on an iPad and here’s what I get on my iPad. Notice the cut-off text at the bottom. It gets worse. When I clicked “in Utah,” this is my screen.

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH THE iPAD VERSION is the iPad must be in landscape mode. Putting the iPad in portrait mode causes major problems because the site prevents scrolling (user-scalable=0). Here’s what you get for the home page when in portrait mode.

When you click on “in Utah”or “News” and you have a large portrait monitor, you get a repeating background. That sucks. It sucks because when you click “Search” or “Highlights” you don’t have the problem.

They’ll fix this—probably by the time you read this—but the Education page blows up in Chrome and Firefox, but not IE9. Hmm.

On the plus side, what they’ve done with content is pretty amazing.

State of Utah

Submitter’s comments: Netflix released a new design of their site. You need to be a subscriber to see the monstrosity that they have unleashed but I think you might have a candidate for next year’s awards. The overall usability has fallen off the charts.

But don’t take my word for it – read some of the 1400+ comments on the blog that have been posted since yesterday morning about this thing.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Wow. I was thinking about joining. My son-in-law has it so I’ll have to check it out.

Netflix explains their new navigation. When you have to explain your navigation, your navigation sucks. I’ve never seen an example to disprove this theory. Sounds like they’ve added Mystery Meat Navigation.

Here’s the Netflix blog discussing the redesign along with 1,500+ comments

Submitter’s comments: This site sucks, because it only works in IE….except it doesn’t even work in IE9 – it just hangs.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Wow. You don’t often see a website where it demands you have a certain browser. It didn’t work in Google Chrome, but it also didn’t work in IE8. Hmm. I guess it basically doesn’t work.

Premier Fishing

Submitter’s comments: I thought you might be interested in this site I have recently come across. I don’t necessarily know how it ranks compared to all the rest of the internet, but I have a feeling it’s pretty bad on just about any scale. Just be prepared for the visual assault before clicking on the link.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: When I saw the URL – rushbiddies.com- I thought it had something to do with Rush Limbaugh, a bunch of annoying old ladies (biddies), a bunch of annoying old ladies being annoyed by Rush, or a bunch of old ladies annoying Rush. Nope. It’s about recruiting high school girls to go Greek. Hmm. That has an unpleasant sound to it. I should change it to “Girls Gone Greek.”

Lots of text problems—contrast, size, centered and flush-left on same page, plus the use of frames.

RushBiddies