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

Submitter’s comments: I love the repeated green ‘leaf’ pattern in the navigation area. The two links deemed to deserve the little red ball decoration are ‘Home’ and, of course, ‘Unmatched Stability’. Also, what more does a customer need to know about the ‘Tree Waterer’ besides what the packaging looks like?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What I love most is the tree stand graphic to the right. They’ve taken a 1.34Mb graphic that’s 2550 x 3300 pixels and scaled it down to 530 x 712 pixels. I don’t know if they think that changing their height= and width= attributes of the IMG tag would also change the physical size of the file but, as we all know, it doesn’t. I ran it through Adobe Fireworks and got the file down to around 63Kb. They make the same mistake on other pages.

The rest of the site is as the submitter commented. It would be nice to read the links on something other than a laptop.<grin> Oh, for some reason the links don’t work on my iPhone.

Cinco Plastics

Submitter’s comments: OMG

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’m headed out to see Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at the Tractor Tavern, so I’m putting this up a little early.

We either have a radio station with a religious bent or a church with a radio bent. That’s part of the problem—focus—as in “Where’s the focus?” There are multiple churches listed and some businesses that seem to be secular. Because of the URL, I’m going to guess it’s a radio station, but even that’s confusing. The URL says VERN1530, but the logo says KVDW 1530. Huh?

VERN1530AM

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Periodically, I’ll take a look at an old Daily Sucker to see if it’s been fixed. Often, they’re fixed. Often, bad elements are just shuffled around like deck chairs on the Titanic. I originally featured Virginia Stucco almost 10 years ago when it had 17, 159 visitors. Ten years later there have been 29,451 visitors. If you just saw 29,451, you wouldn’t know if that number were good or bad. It’s bad because it means a little over 3.5 people per day visited the site. On the other hand, if they all bought something, it might not be bad. As I often say, “It depends.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the 2001 and 2011 versions of the site. You can see that, for the most part, they rearranged deck chairs.

Virginia Stucco

Submitter’s comments: Netflix released a new design of their site. You need to be a subscriber to see the monstrosity that they have unleashed but I think you might have a candidate for next year’s awards. The overall usability has fallen off the charts.

But don’t take my word for it – read some of the 1400+ comments on the blog that have been posted since yesterday morning about this thing.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Wow. I was thinking about joining. My son-in-law has it so I’ll have to check it out.

Netflix explains their new navigation. When you have to explain your navigation, your navigation sucks. I’ve never seen an example to disprove this theory. Sounds like they’ve added Mystery Meat Navigation.

Here’s the Netflix blog discussing the redesign along with 1,500+ comments

Submitter’s comments: This site sucks, because it only works in IE….except it doesn’t even work in IE9 – it just hangs.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Wow. You don’t often see a website where it demands you have a certain browser. It didn’t work in Google Chrome, but it also didn’t work in IE8. Hmm. I guess it basically doesn’t work.

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