The Daily Sucker

Submitter comments: I was perusing your site and thought this might be a good one to add to your list…why?
Three links to the home page on the home page, all of which increase the counter…among other obvious things…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, it’s obviously ugly and all the red links go to the home pages of the manufacturers. I don’t understand why they bother to have a web site.

Sound Hounds

Submitter comments: Here’s a site suggestion for you. It’s 100% graphics and PDF, and (according to the site) is copyrighted until the end of time. They could use your assistance (big time).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Another 1995 technique we don’t often see. Why? Because it doesn’t help the search engines categorize your site. The only real text in the page is the TITLE tag (and thank goodness for that). On some of the subpages there are contrast issues.

The Extra Reading Company

Submitter comments: Camera Corner Connecting Point is our local authorized repair shop for both PCs and Macs. They do decent enough work and their web site looked decent enough, too. But they’ve added these people that appear in the middle of the screen and talk. When you try to scroll, they follow you. Yuck!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is another one of those ideas that must have seemed brilliant during a meeting because everyone was on LSD. When I say “brilliant,” I mean “bright” not “highly intelligent.” It was “bright” because the acid had just hit and they were seeing fluorescent colors.

If you go to a sub-page and then come back to the home page, the guy starts talking all over again. Does anyone at the company realize how annoying this is to a normal human being? This is stupid. It’s the web equivalent of not knowing Africa is a continent.

Camera Corner Connecting Point

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