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

Submitter’s comments: This site sucks.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, it sucks in Google Chrome, but looks “fine” (OK, the text is legible) in IE 10 and Firefox. If you look at the source code, it’s some very squirrelly JavaScript. They also don’t understand the concept of DNS. If you leave off the “www”, the page won’t load. Dumb. Dumber. Dumbest.

Calderwood Books

Submitter’s comments: The only thing that helps(?) in figuring this one out is the header: “Free Energy. Gravity Control. Alternative Science.” The “about” page is only 20 screens, as opposed the home page’s nearly 100. I think I’ll follow the advice about three screens down  – “…No Like? Just skip what you aren’t interested in…” – and skip the whole website.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s another in a long line of Over the top Websites (OTT). Over the Top sites generally deal with philosophy, religion, politics, end times, etc., but they’re generally not mainstream. Most often, they’re the creations of liberal loons or raving right-wingers.

What drives me crazy is there are plenty of over-the-top types who have nice looking websites. MemoryHole, by Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theorist Professor James Tracy‘s website looks infinitely better than the run-of-the-mill OTT site featured on WebPagesThatSuck. An even better example of a good-looking OTT website is InfoWars, which is run by Alex Jones.

C’mon guys, you’ve got Internet connections in your bunkers. Use some of your comrades’ design techniques and de-suck your websites.

KeelyNet

Submitter’s comments: School children all over America get sent to this terrible, terrible website. Just wait for the awful cursor tracker…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I have to ask myself, “Is this the kind of site school children expect to see?” Heck no. It’s an insult to the intelligence of children everywhere. It’s just another Over-the-top Website. To make matters worse, they have unmarked Microsoft Word Documents. Click a link and you start to download a document.

Massengale’s Biology Junction

Submitter’s comments: In general, this website is an ugly 90’s-style website,
but the real kicker occurs here, where the coder forgot to close every header tag on the page.
This site just recently got a lot of attention from being featured in a Twitter tweet that was then reposted on several other sites.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What’s most impressive is that somebody spent their valuable time trying to figure out what was wrong with the page. Seriously, this is one of the more screwed-up text pages I’ve seen, but it looks “fine” in Internet Explorer. If you’re using Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Safari, then the text keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Sewing and Embroidery Warehouse

Submitter’s comments: There are some pages that are badly designed, and then there are pages that are just terrible. This is one of the terribly designed ones. The home page is wide, REALLY wide and you have to scroll horizontally. The text is not searchable because the text is graphics-based and most of the text is in some crazy font that isn’t readable. The navigation and legibility are just a nightmare.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I rarely ROTFALMFWAO (Roll On The Floor And Laugh My Fat White Ass Off) when I visit a website, but I rolled around when I discovered this site had disabled the right click mouse function because the site owner didn’t want any of his graphics stolen. Wow! Talk about delusions of adequacy. It’s also an insult to every gun-toting visitor to the site—a website thinking that their visitors don’t know how to disable JavaScript to get the images. Of course, who would want them?

If you ever wondered where all the beveled text on the Internet ended up after everyone stopped using this technique, it ended up on this website. Jeez Louise. This technique stopped before my site started in July 1996.

On the plus side, most of the text on many of the pages is readable—but then there’s the “Questions” page.

High Noon Holsters