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

Submitter’s comments: Mystery Meat Navigation, very little information or context about the product, use of Flash, and inaccessible design make this website suck.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Dude:/Dudette: This is a website for San Francisco-based cigarette rolling papers. It’s supposed to suck because the audience will never notice the difference. If this were a website for any other business, you would be 200% correct—so don’t use these techniques unless this is your audience. Oh, the site is probably NSFW.

Here’s an old video of a speech I gave where the site catered to the same market.

Randy’s Wired Cigarette Rolling Papers

Submitter’s comments: I’ve followed your website for some time I have a few terrible links for you to review. I hope they’ll make the cut; hopefully, they don’t offend your eyes too much.

Just Jobs 4 Students Submitter’s comments: Yukky colour scheme and hidden nav. Vincent Flanders’ comments: Not sure about the navigation, but there’s too much white space and the text is too small. Of course, in this job market, who cares? Finding a job is tough.

PMIS Estate Agents Submitter’s comments: Pure vomit. Vincent Flanders’ comments: I don’t think I’ve seen blue and purple vomit, but the color scheme is atrocious.

Interesting selection. It’s going to be an interesting year.

Submitter’s comments: The Products page at Trader Joe’s tells us to “Please select your location and we’ll show you all the new goodies available.” When you look at the page, you can’t tell what you need to do to display the products.

Spoiler alert!!!!!!

You may want to see if you can figure out how to display the products before reading below.

It is quite counterintuitive as to what to do next because:

1) The page has a cutesy graphic that doesn’t really tell you where to go.
2) Where you need to go is two frames up.
3) “Location” for a retail establishment is usually the one closest to you and not the state you happen to live in.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: For those of you who learn best by seeing pictures, here’s the Trader Joe’s page in question, along with an explanation of the problem.

I can’t understand how Trader Joe’s could make such an amazingly bad mistake. This navigation is so illogical. I’m not going to look at arrows to try to figure out where to go. Put the navigation where it belongs.

Trader Joe’s Product Page

Submitter’s comments: Oh, my eyes! Great community arts organization, but If you can tolerate the complete visual mayhem long enough to look closely, you will see that this is an events calendar.  In roughly chronological order, with no particular pattern for arranging the days of the week.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What’s interesting to me is that the small, multicolored text is actually readable. Probably because it is on a black background.

We have issues with “Where’s the focus?” I’d reorganize the groupings by category, rather than date. Then, I would put only this month’s listings in the category with a link to the full listings on another page.

There are fatal color inconsistencies. Orange text can be a link or a header. It seems that every listing has “Amazing Things Arts Center.” Why?

Amazing Things Arts Center