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The Daily Sucker - Current examples of bad web design

The Daily Sucker

Sites featured in articles like Worst Websites of 2010 often are redesigned, which explains why some sites mentioned in my articles don't match their current look. The Daily Sucker features current examples of bad web design which haven't been fixed (yet).

If you see a site that you think sucks, email the URL to me. No personal pages (personal pages are supposed to reflect the individual's personality and artistic freedom) or web site designers (it would look like a conflict of interest), or others of their ilk.

If I think there's some merit to your selection, I may post it along with some commentary. If you know of a site that qualifies, let me know.

Habitrail – An Example of Bad Web Design for November 14, 2012

November 14th, 2012 3:03 am by Vincent Flanders

A bad website

Submitter’s comments: A “mascot” worse than Clippy; hamsters; Mystery Meat Navigation; Flash; and happy, bright, obnoxious colors.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If there’s one thing that scares the bejesus out of me, it’s the use of “hamsters” and “mystery meat” in the same sentence.

The worst of the two designs is the one on the left. It’s pretty frightening. Take a look and you’ll agree.

Habitrail

Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |


Sarcasmistan – NSFW – An Example of Bad Web Design for November 12, 2012

November 12th, 2012 3:03 am by Vincent Flanders

A bad website

Submitter’s comments: As far as bad taste goes, my candidate is on par with The Afterlife, though at least it won’t trigger epilepsy attacks.

Better close other tabs before opening this web page in Firefox (under 64-bit Windows 7); it brings down the browser despite the available 16 GB of RAM.

This is a 2.6 MB heavy HTML page containing nearly 4,000 image links in one huge table.

Each image is shown as a 200 x 200 thumbnail, but the referenced pictures are full-size images averaging 100 Kb. That means that the renderer has to handle no less than 400 MB of data to display the page.

So you can’t blame Mozilla for the crashing of Firefox. Firefox faithfully tries to load all the resources on the page and the renderer simply can’t handle the 400 MB. You can start loading the page though, but make sure to abort it after a couple of seconds.

Since most pictures are not square, the scaling to a square distorts them, with an extreme example at the bottom left of the screen. This is a 454 x 12,432 pixel JPEG image, weighing in 2.2 MB. Horizontally it’s scaled by a factor of 2, vertically by a factor of 60.

Internet Explorer doesn’t crash because it quickly stops downloading images. If you try to save the complete web page, IE downloads the images one after another without rendering them, yet it also gives up after 2 hours(!) of downloading, and removes the 2,700 images it got so far (260 MB).

I estimate the whole page to be around 500,000 pixels high, so it’s no surprise the screen capture program SnagIt also “failed scrolling capture”.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There’s nothing funny about this website. In fact, there are a lot of “humor” websites who use the same horrible web design techniques.

I ran the page through WebPageTest and the page crashed the test. It stopped at 10Mb and 25,000 DOM elements. The Page Speed Optimization Test scored a marvelously low 19 out of 100. The page is a big, fat POS, which is what an old girlfriend once called me. Hmm.

Sarcasmistan NSFW

Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |


The ‘I’m having my annual bout with bronchitis’ Daily Suckers for November 8, 2012

November 8th, 2012 2:02 am by Vincent Flanders

A bad website

Vincent Flanders’ comments: On average, I get bronchitis once a year. This year I got it going out trick or treating with my grandson. As long as I don’t die, it was worth it (I was hospitalized with bronchitis a couple of years ago). If I die, well…that sucks.

I’m going to provide several Daily Sucker candidates without screen shots or my commentary. The folks who submit sites are cool and know what they’re talking about.

1. Uncle Bill’s Bike Shop

I have a contender for you, this site sheared two of my five senses, left me permanently cross-eyed, made my ears bleed and dulled my mental capacity to the point that I have forgotten what this email is about.

Uncle Bill’s Bike Shop

2. Hobby Insider

Submitter’s comments: It’s the 1990’s, man.

Hobby Insider

3. Showeb

Submitter’s comments: Ran across this when looking for puppets.

Showeb

4. The Anderson

Submitter’s comments: Found this hopeless website. Tried to look for opening times. Good luck!

The Anderson

Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |


TYR – GWYR – GWERYN Genocide – An Example of Bad Web Design for October 29, 2012

October 28th, 2012 11:11 pm by Vincent Flanders

A bad website

Submitter’s comments: Did you ever think that genocide against a people could result in such horrors (of websites)?

Ignoring the lunatic claim that there is a genocide going on against an ethnic group in England, this site has some lovely bizarre features. Enjoy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The major sin of the site is its 1995 boring. For an Over-the-top Website, it looks pretty good.

TYR – GWYR – GWERYN Genocide

Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design |


Universal Products – An Example of Bad Web Design for October 26, 2012

October 26th, 2012 5:05 am by Vincent Flanders

A bad website

Submitter’s comments: The useless splash page, which you’ll love covers an old website with readability issues. The weird thing is that they show lots of images of brochures, so I expected to be PDF-bombed, but all their brochures are posted as graphics

They do such cool stuff, especially for cars, that the splash page is a double fail, the more I think about it.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The term “useless splash page” doesn’t need the word “useless” because that’s an unnecessary modifier. There are very few occasions where you need a splash page: multi-lingual / multinational websites and “sin” websites — liquor, porn, gambling, adult, tobacco, etc. This is a normal business website so that makes this site a FAIL. It’s a double FAIL because it uses a different form of Mystery Meat Navigation. Instead of clicking the globe to enter the site, which is a natural reaction, you have to click the spinning text. That’s bad enough, but you might need to click when the text is rotating and you can’t read the links. DOUBLE FAIL. Here’s what the home page looks like on an iPhone. TRIPLE FAIL. When you’re on a many of the subpages and you click the “Home” link, you’re taken back to the splash page. QUADRUPLE FAIL. The navigation on the subpages is also Flash-based. PENTA? (QUINQUE?) FAIL.

The menu on the Digital Media page is almost impossible to read. The website is pretty much a FAIL.

Universal Products

Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |


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