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

An excellent article that partially explains (to me) why people who have sucky websites don’t understand their websites suck.

The key phrase is:

People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.

If any of you folks out there are looking for a good research project, I think examining people who have sucky websites but think they don’t suck, would be pretty darn interesting.

How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance

Here’s Your One-Stop Guide For Everything You Need To Know To Make It In Tech

Bing Gives a List of 18 SEO Fundamentals

Gee, you would think that companies who specialize in making other websites better would be paragons of good web design techniques. You would think they would follow their own guidelines. Some do and some don’t.

Shouldn’t Web Optimization Companies Own Sites Be Optimized?

Gee. That’s pretty logical, right? Being the clever little boy that I am, I just had to run three popular optimization-type tests on some companies that provide page/site optimization services. What do the results mean? Heck if I know. I just gather information, I leave interpretations up to others.

Shouldn’t Web Optimization Companies Own Sites Be Optimized?

Brightcove is launching an entire new product line for making mobile and web apps called Brightcove App Cloud. Developers will be able to use App Cloud to create their apps once and then deploy them to the iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and beyond. It creates HTML5 apps as well as mobile touch websites, and it is not limited to video apps.

It’s on TechCrunch

Google wants to give high-quality search results. Obviously, everyone with a website wants to rank highly in search results, but nobody is sure what Google is looking for. This article provides additional guidance.

More guidance on building high-quality sites

A very nice series of articles for all you small business owners. It’s an easy, smooth read — which is how good writing should be.

Featuring:

Q&A with design guru Vincent Flanders For 15 years, Vincent Flanders has turned the spotlight on poorly designed websites at his own website: webpagesthatsuck.com.

If your small-business website isn’t designed to sell, what good is it doing you? Since opening in 2008 in River North, Marbles: The Brain Store has grown into a $3-million business selling toys and puzzles to improve memory and critical thinking, primarily through its stores. Prior to a major overhaul last year, sales from the company’s website (MarblesTheBrainStore.com) accounted for less than 1% of revenue.

You don’t need to completely overhaul your website to boost your sales — tweaks can do the trick It’s not enough simply to build and launch a website. It must be updated and maintained. But you don’t need a complete overhaul to get results. Often small tweaks can help drive traffic or

Tips for turning web browsers into buyers Consumers have grown increasingly comfortable shopping on the web. Yet it’s estimated that less than 5% of website visitors turn into buyers.

Smart sellers embrace smartphones: Customers expect mobile access to your website now Today, millions of people access websites and download mobile applications from their smartphones and tablet computers, and the number is expected to grow.

No special URL. Just go to any page at The Daily Sucker on your phone ( iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm OS and Samsung) or your iPad.

It’s a bit slow. I had to disable cache, etc.

My predictions are next to last.

If you’re into making your site load faster and are technically inclined, Performance Calendar has so much Heroin Content I feel dopey when I read it. Like most people, I dream of being this smart. Oh, Google wants you to speed up your websites.

Every musician (and web designer) should learn web marketing from the Drive By Truckers’ current site. Brilliant. Great site.

The section “Standards, Standards, Standards” in Christina Warren’s article Why Designers and Developers Should Care About Internet Explorer 9 is so full of crap that no enema bottle can unplug it.

The web site HTML5Test provides “an indication of how well your browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard and related specifications. It does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect.” It gives each browser a score and here are the scores I got on my machines (highest possible score is 300):

217 Google Chrome 6.0.472.59 beta (plus 10 bonus points) – Windows 7 and Vista
207 Safari 5.0.2 (7533.18.5) (plus 7 bonus points) – Windows 7
207 Safari 5.0 (7533.16) (plus 7 bonus points) – Vista
204 Firefox 4.0b5 (and 9 bonus points) – Vista
159 Opera 10.60 (plus 7 bonus points) – Vista
159 Opera 10.62 (plus 7 bonus points – Vista
139 Firefox 3.6.9 (plus 4 bonus points) – Windows 7
139 Firefox 3.68 (plus 4 bonus points) – Vista
106 IE 9 Beta (9.0.7930.16406) (plus 3 bonus points) – Windows 7
037 IE 8 (8.0.6001.18943) (and no bonus points) – Vista
022 IE 7 (7.0.5730.13) and no bonus points – XP

Yes, IE 9 is almost 3X more compliant than IE 8 and almost 5 times more compliant than IE 7, but its score is one-half of Google’s.

Why is everybody sucking up to Microsoft’s not-quite-as-crappy-as-it-used-to-be browser? The Browser War is not the Special Olympics.

I hate forms. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, WPTS is a form-free zone. However, they’re insanely important for most sites and here’s “Best Practices in Form Design,” a free, downloadable, 133-page PDF (4.37Mb) from the guy who wrote the book on forms.

Download the PDF

Since it’s my policy not to comment on web designers’ sites, I won’t comment on any of these 10 selections by iMediaConnecion. Let me just say “10 awesome agency websites” is their article title.

10 awesome agency websites

Customers Increasingly Intolerant With Slow Web Sites

Website Owner’s Manual — 2 free PDF chapters from the book – http://bit.ly/6EVKqK and http://bit.ly/8Mftfl

“Microsoft confirms free security software ships Tuesday” — http://bit.ly/HZM94

Reading “How to Fix a Website with a High Bounce Rate” http://bit.ly/1aIBbk

Reading “Top 10 Apps for Scheduling a Meeting Online” http://bit.ly/2gEzFY I’ve used Doodle and like it.

I’ve posted the second quarter’s group of horrible web sites.

Worst Web Sites of 2009: April-June #1-10

Worst Web Sites of 2009: April-June #11-20

I’m using a new design that I’m slowly working through the site. Sheesh. I must have a dozen slightly different/way different designs at WPTS. Uh…I believe that’s a pretty good sign your web site sucks <grin>.

“Hulu’s Overrated Web Design” at http://ping.fm/UUwvQ

“Let’s make the web faster” http://ping.fm/wrDkj

“The Billion Dollar HTML Tag (attribute)” http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/24/the-billion-dollar-html-tag/