August 4th, 2011 3:03 am by Vincent Flanders
Low Price Skates – Bad Web Design Example #2 for for the week of August 1-5, 2011
Submitter’s comments: Here’s an ugly website.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Wow! Not so much for the site, but for distant memories. Once upon a time, I was a 6-foot tall 140-lb teenager. I went roller skating every Friday night from 7:00 p.m. to midnight; every Saturday from 1:00 p.m. to midnight; and every Sunday from 1-6 p.m. That’s probably why I weighed 140 lbs.
It was very strange to see they still make the same style of boots that I wore back in 19XX.
Speaking of strange, I know the site sucks but I’m amazed at its consistency (yes, it consistently sucks). The navigation seems to be logical and consistent and, unlike 95% of the sites that animated GIFs, their use makes sense.
It’s quite “colorful,” but you can actually read the text. Hmm.
Low Price Skates
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design |
August 4th, 2011 3:03 am by Vincent Flanders
Submitter’s comments: I was looking at some local businesses sites earlier, and this one made me boggle.
It’s like they went, “Oh, that top line of photos look great!” and just started throwing them around everywhere on top of each other like a vomit of dance photos and photos of low-contrast text. And then I checked the source code, and boggled more.
I know it’s just a small-town dance school, but damn, even the town corn maze has a better page than that.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: There are a lot of interesting problems.
- The home page TITLE tag is “Home.”
- My monitor is 1200 pixels wide and you have to horizontally scroll to see everything because the page is cut off.
- The logo might be professionally made, but it’s white. I can’t really see it that well.
- They’re not a non-profit so they shouldn’t have a mission statement on the home page. The good news is the mission statement is at the bottom and it’s hard to read because the text is white.
- They didn’t look to see what the home page looks like in the Chrome browser. The page is broken, with some sections overlapping others. It’s also broken in Firefox 5.
- Images have non-SEO-friendly names like image3461.jpg.
- They used some Microsoft Office program to generate the HTML.
The Dee Buchanan Studio of Dance
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |
July 26th, 2011 1:01 am by Vincent Flanders
Vincent Flanders’ comments: The Huffington post recently ran the article 14 Websites We Don’t Even… Thanks to author Craig Malamut for referencing and linking to Web Pages That Suck. Eight of the 14 sites were originally featured on WPTS and Malamut knows how to pick the worst of my worst. In fact, he has a very good eye for very bad web design and his commentary has just the right amount of snarkiness. Kudos. The other six sites he selected are pretty freaking awful. I’m going to skip one site that seems like a personal site and honor him with submitting the other five as excellent candidates for Worst Website of 2011.
6. I Kiss You
His English is better than my whatever-is-his-native-language (“I try to be good person” should be “I try to be a good person”). By far, it’s the least offensive of the sites. Just a little cheesy (you’ll understand my reference to “cheesy” a bit later).
I Kiss You
10. Historian of the Future
The Historian of the Future has a website of the past. As I’ve said many times, there’s no need for a mission statement (unless you’re a nonprofit) because every mission statement can be summarized as “All babies must eat.” Except for this site. It’s mission statement is seven paragraphs long and I’m not sure what it says.
The great news is s/he actually tried to categorize the material and created a navigation system instead of one long page. The bad news is the site is 1996.
Historian of the Future
11. Raft.org
Holy Mother of God. This site was a definite contender for the #1 Worst Website of 2011 (ironically, I have about four sure winners), but the site has “disappeared.” It’s probably gone because of all the traffic The Huffington Post sent. Fear not. I made a quickie video (no sound) that will give you a good idea of how horrible the site was/is.
12. Aiseikai
It looks like it’s for a hospital. The sheer horror of it makes me wonder, “If you check in, will you be able to check out?”
We have everything that’s bad in American websites, with the added problem of Japanese text. These folks also don’t understand DNS. If you leave off the “www” as in http://aiseikai.or.jp/, the website won’t work. Then again, that’s not a bad thing. At the very least, it qualifies, as do most of the others, to join the Over-the-top Websites.
Aiseikai
13. Mama Cheesie’s
It’s an Italian restaurant, right? Nope. They sell handmade clothing and accessories. Not the least of the site’s problems is the name “Cheesy.” As the Free Dictionary defines the word, “Informal banal or trite; in poor taste.” Not what I’d want. I’m always stunned when I look at sites like this. Doesn’t anybody see that you can’t easily read the text. AccessColor says it fails W3C standards on 43.38% of the total text. It’s a total disaster.
Mama Cheesie’s
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |
July 21st, 2011 3:03 am by Vincent Flanders
My wife: You know that link you sent me? They want me to register.”
Vincent Flanders’ comments: That isn’t helpful. “That link you sent me” tells me nothing. Fortunately, I went and asked her, “What link?” Turns out the link was for a new food site called Gojee.
Basically, you have to register before you can use the website. Yes, I know there are links, but they’re not terribly informative. The “About Us” link tells you it’s a food site that has a lot of writers, pretty pictures and if you tell them what food and food-related items you have in your cupboard, they’ll come up with a recipe suggestion.
I thought the “register before you can get content” concept was dead. I even thought about removing it from Does Your Web Site Suck? Checklist #1. Good thing I didn’t.
BTW, they’ve got some talented back-end people who are performing all sorts of web-page loading magic to keep this site so snappy. Gojee is also using Kissmetrics to help “Identify, understand, and improve the metrics that drive your online business.” Good idea.
In case you they change the site (and with Kissmetrics they might do that if their tests tell them to change), so here’s a screenshot of the Gojee home page. It’s very tasty.
Gojee
Posted in Bad Business Practices, Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design |
July 21st, 2011 2:02 am by Vincent Flanders
Vincent Flanders’ comments: My article, Does Your Web Site Suck? Checklist #1 — 155 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell, used to feature only 149 Mortal Sins. Well, we’re now up to 155 and it’s a doozy.
This isn’t the first time it has happened to me. It happened when I tried to order an upgrade to Adobe InDesign. If you ever dealt with Adobe, you know how difficult it is. You have to log in—which means you have to dig up the email address and password you created—plus all the usual ID and credit card info hoops. Just as I clicked the last button, it blew up. I never did upgrade InDesign.
You should check out the article. Lots of revisions and more examples have been added. There are examples for roughly 75 out of the 155 sins. More are on the way.
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |