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

Submitter’s comments: My husband works for a scientific institution and couldn’t believe it when he encountered this website. It’s very hard to believe that this website is for an “intellectual” organization!

Scroll down to see what they added to the bottom of their site—”We apologize for any inconvenience.”—I guess they want to apologize in advance for giving people seizures!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: One of the things that bothers me about programmers—and other really smart folks—is they believe that because they’re an expert in one area (programming, let’s say) they are experts in all areas. I might tone it down a bit and say they believe they’re expert in many other areas. I think that’s what happened with today’s Daily Sucker. They think they’re web designers.

Frankly, I’m stunned. If you told me that an organization like this would have a site that uses animated images, 1990’s background image, pictures with white backgrounds on top of the yellow background, scaled images on subpages, tables and a whole bunch of other web design mistakes, I wouldn’t have believed you. The biggest of these “other mistakes” is the site doesn’t look professional and people don’t want to deal with you.

In some browsers, the graphics don’t even show up (Firefox 5 , Safari and IE9), but do show up in Google Chrome.

This organization reminds me of another one that I saved as a YouTube video—The International Association of Glaucoma Societies. That site was a classic

DAAAM International Vienna

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I wanted to be a professional poker player long before it became respectable. Back in the early 1960’s you were looked upon as a criminal, which you were since gambling was illegal. Unfortunately—or fortunately—I didn’t have the necessary talent, math skills, and people-reading ability. Oh. I couldn’t keep a poker face, either. Heck, I don’t know the difference between the Big Blind and my Big Fat Ass.

Well, the World Series of Poker (WSOP) seems to have something in common with VF. It’s not good at math. I went to look up the background on Jody Howe. He had recently been eliminated from the tournament and I wanted to see how much he had earned. The page said he had earned a total of $13,349 in his career, but it listed his WSOP winnings as $160,036. In fact, it listed this number twice. In case the WSOP fixes their mistakes, here’s a screenshot of the erroneous page.

If you’re going to use numbers, make sure your back-end software works correctly.

Jody Howe background page at the World Series of Poker

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s an important website. It’s one you should be reading. It’s one that’s difficult to read unless you’re on a laptop, Mac (I assume) or an iPhone (although the text is a little small).

What’s the problem. Contrast, of course. The home page is readable on my laptop—but it’s about five inches closer to my face than my desk monitor. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everything is fine if you’re close enough. But it fails the W3C guidelines for contrast. AccessColor reports that:

The W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness.

Based on these considerations, the results for this page are:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 18.11% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 67.32% of the total the text.

You can see the first part of the results in this screenshot.

TNW has some front/backend issues, too. Yslow gives the home page a score of 59 and Page Speed gives it an 89. Yslow seems to score web pages like it’s the Olympics. Page Speed seems to score like it’s the Special Olympics.

The Next Web

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Back on July 4, I discussed a stupid web design feature I found on musician Robbie Robertson’s website. Here’s what I said:

Go to Robbie’s images from the 1970’s page. Take a look at the first photo entitled, “The Last Waltz.” Click on the picture. What do you get? Well, not what you’re expecting. If you’re like me, you think you’ll get a bigger version of the picture; otherwise, why is there a link? No. You get the same picture at the same size. What?

Today’s sucker is a little bit worse. Web Performance Today ran a very interesting and important article: Fourth-party calls: What you don’t know can hurt your site… and your visitors (make sure you read the article). In the middle of the page you’ll see a 480- x 352-pixel graphic (here’s a screenshot). If you click the picture to see the larger version, you get a slightly larger 667- x 486-pixel graphic that you really can’t read.

If you go to the original image on SlideShare and then click the full screen icon, you’ll get an image that’s 1095- x 806-pixels and you can read it.

If you’re going to make an image bigger, make it big enough to read and understand.

Web Performance Today – Fourth-party calls: What you don’t know can hurt your site… and your visitors

Submitter’s comments: I believe this is intended to be a commercial site for a breeder of livestock dogs and pygmy goats. However, the site is such a hot mess that I can’t figure out whether it is personal or business.

Either way, I don’t believe I’ll be purchasing my next puppy from these folks.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I have never understood how someone could look at a home page like this and say, “Yes, this web page looks just fine.” No one has been able to explain this phenomenon to me. Then again, I just got an email from a site that’s a contender for Worst Website of 2011 and said he improved his website and wanted to know it still sucked. I swear to you that I can’t see a single change and even if it has changed it still sucks like Hurricane Katrina.

I can’t tell if this is a personal or business site—and that’s good enough to make it a Daily Sucker.

Livestock Guardian Angels