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

Submitter comments: After seeing this site, my engagement is off! I now totally, absolutely, 100% vow a life of celibacy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I remember the priests and nuns at my Catholic grade school telling us that if we thought we were facing immanent death, we should say an Act of Contrition and our sins would be forgiven — or something like that. After viewing this site the only thing that’s keeping me alive is the thought of death.

You have to love the keyword stuffing that’s going on. Most people try to hide the fact. Because of all the color combinations on the page, they just put the keywords at the bottom.

You must click the ENTER YVETTE’S link and see the home page. OMG. This site is a shoo-in for inclusion Worst Web Sites of 2008.

Yvette’s

Another great Seth Godin post — you are reading his blog aren’t you?

The trap: Use all your money to build a fancy website and leave no money or patience for the hundred revisions you’ll need to do.

The trap: read the tech blogs and fall in love with the bleeding-edge hip sites and lose focus on the long-term players that deliver real value.

Definitely not a Daily Sucker.

The secret of the web

To celebrate the beginning of WebPagesThatSuck’s 13th year I thought I’d go through my vault of bad web design and show you some of the classics.

Sadly, a lot of the mistakes you’ll see are still being made 13 years later. Fortunately, most of the companies I’ll feature learned the errors of their way and fixed their sites. They’re hoping and praying that these mistakes will remain buried because they don’t show up in Archive.org.

My first example is from 1998 and the company in question is Janus — “a global investment manager offering institutional and intermediary clients and individual investors complementary asset management disciplines including growth and risk-managed strategies.” Really? You’d never know it by looking at their site.

Here’s the YouTube video (and here are more of my videos at YouTube)

A nicer and higher resolution version at WebPagesThatSuck.TV

I’m not the only person who recognizes that architects have problems with their web sites. treehugger takes architects to task over their web sites. I’m going to add these suckers to my Bad Architects Sites.

Here are some more articles about bad architectural web sites: bd and the Guardian.

Submitter comments: Flash-based site, Wait-For-It homepage intro, Mystery Meat (birds count as meat, right?), annoying sound effects, contrast issues, pop-
up windows (in the “press” section”. Did I miss anything?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Not a whole lot. The lack of contrast is what drives me crazy. On the other hand there’s some “good” news on the Flash front. Here’s another e-mail I received:

I am a regular visitor to your site and just came across an article you might be interested in: Once Nearly Invisible To Search Engines, Flash Files Can Now Be Found And Indexed.

Of course I’m sure this will do nothing to stop the wide spread suckiness of web design in general, but it’s a step forward at least.

You’re right, of course. The key part of the article is:

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

You just know that spammers are out there trying to figure out how they can game the system. It will be easier to game because it will be harder to figure out if someone is spamming because all the evil is hiding inside of a Flash file. You won’t be able to look at a Flash page and figure out what’s going on in the same way you can look at an HTML file.

Thomas Paul