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

Submitter’s comments: I was looking around for some pet supply stores in my area and stumbled on this beauty.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It starts off poorly and gets worse. You have the logo on a repeating background. Then you have a strange orange bar going down the left side, which is supposed to be the background. It would have been better to have a similar bar on the right, which would have centered the middle content section.

As you move down you have white text on a black background. It’s not horrible. Then you get to the gold background and all sorts of text problems–text in all caps, multicolored text on the same line, etc. The links are graphics, but not every graphic is a link. A couple of the links go to betteranimals.com–I’m not sure why–but I couldn’t get the site to load because their server timed out. As far as I can tell, it’s a one-page site.

P & A Feed and Pet

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Robbie Robertson has had an amazing musical career. Simply amazing. His website is your average musician website—not as brilliant as his career nor as badly designed as it could be. However, he’s committing a very annoying web design sin: clicking on an image doesn’t give you a bigger image.

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?

About.com’s Record Comic Book Auction Prices page has the same problem, but presents it in a more obnoxious manner. When you mouse over the comic book graphic, the message “View Full Size,” pops up (screenshot 250 x 400 pixels). Guess what you get when you click? The same-size picture (screenshot 250 x 400 pixels).

A site that knows how to handle images is PostSecret.

Submitter’s comments: This site was done “professionally. It was designed to be maintained by a volunteer; not clear how that happens.

It has the most cumbersome navigation of any site I’ve ever come across (scrolling within a scrollable page? WTF!).

The organization’s logo looks like a knock-off from the Burger King breakfast menu. It takes a ridiculously long time to load, and for what? A crappy image map that isn’t clear at all.

If you can find useful information in less than five clicks, congratulations!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The 1,489,362-byte image map takes a long time to load and the focal point is a cock rooster. That’s not the kind of cock rooster people want to wait to see load. If people have to wait that long, they want to see naked and/or dead bodies.

The subpage navigation is very strange. It consists of “scrollbars,” but they’re on the left side. I don’t think I’ve seen that before. The home link is the Rooster on the bottom right of the page. The bottom right? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, either. If you go to the Sponsors page and click on the Rooster, you’re not taken back to the home page, but you are taken to a weird looking error page. They’ll fix it, so here it is in all its glory.

New Jersey State Fair

Submitter’s comments: This one is absolutely FOUL.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Incredibly foul. Does it look like the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s website? (This is my baseline website) No. Then it should.

Note: I’m not saying every site should copy IMA’s design. I’m saying, it’s a clean, effective design and you should strive for that type of design.

Burbage Carnival

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Once again, “Where’s the focus?” Dan has so many ads and self-promotional things going on that it’s difficult to see where to go. It doesn’t help that the contrast sucks on the top horizontal navigation menu so you can’t read the links.

I love ads. My old man was in television broadcasting from 1948-1990, so advertising makes me happy. Hell, I even appeared naked on a full-size billboard to promote an ISP where I was employed. But there are limits to advertising and self-promotion. Basically, when your advertising gets in the way of your content, then you’ve gone too far. Dan’s gone too far. If you don’t want to visit the site, here’s a screen capture.

Sport Fishing With Dan Hernandez