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

Submitter’s comments: Please take a look at this site for an example of how not to market a restaurant. You have to go through two pages before you get to Enter the website proper, but on the way you see that it was voted Nightclub of the Year, then go to the Welcome page before getting to the Home page. The gallery of food pictures isn’t boosting Tito’s gastronomic reputation either.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The fact the website has two different Splash pages before you get to the real home page is bad design. Obviously, they want to get you to vote for their restaurant in the Latin UK awards. This is a great example of Mistake #1 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Believing people care about you and your website.“ Your website is about meeting your visitors’ needs. Your visitors don’t give a left-handed flying farkle that you want to win awards. Your visitors are looking for food. You’re keeping food from them.

I found it difficult to figure out how to get to the next page. The itty-bitty “Home” link is not intuitive. The next Splash page at least has the hours of operation, but that’s it. Clicking the “Enter” button actually takes you to the “Info” page, which is the real home page. We have navigation at the top. Clicking the links takes you to the appropriate pages.

Tito’s mobile version of this site is much easier to use, to wit (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase):

• A screen shot of the mobile home page.
• A screen shot of the mobile menu page.
• A screen shot of the web version’s menu page.

It’s all about your visitors. It’s not about you.

Tito’s Peruvian Restaurant

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: A pretty bad site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yes, it’s true, but I have a lot of sympathy for newspaper-type sites. Too much information, too many ads (that’s a good thing) and, in this case, too little of the stories. The site seems like it’s just gathering pieces of content and then sending you to other sites. That’s not helpful.

Billerica.org

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: This is a regional store that has been in business for at least 30 years. Every incarnation of their web page is the absolute worst. Their stores are great and their service is good too, but you can’t find anything on their web pages.

I’ve tried different browsers and written to them – nothing seems to work. You used to be able to see some of what is in their stores with pictures and prices to match, but now I can’t figure out anything. I’ve used other national vitamin sites and they work just fine; granted they have more money to spend, but this company just keeps expanding its stores and says it wants you to buy from its online store, but how can you? Is it just me or does it really suck?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It really sucks. I spent 10 minutes looking for something organic. No luck. Finally, I found a link called “Online Store.” Online Store my fat, white ass. Access Denied? What?

Natural Grocers

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: Not a web page that sucks, but a Twitter promotion thingy from American Express.

Just listen to these ‘simple’ instructions to tweet-and-spend your way to AMEX rewards. And they show the guy hand-typing in long hash tags.

Watched this and thought how much you’d hate it.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: You’re right. I hate it a lot, but not as much as I hate typing on an iPhone. This video glosses over how much trouble it is to type these hashtags. Take a look at the screenshot above. This screenshot makes three hashtags look easy to type. They’re not.

Amex Sync on Twitter

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: Just how many featured articles can a home page have before none are featured? This one “features” a length of over 100 (!) pages/screens of articles going back to at least 2005. As with many really Over-the-top Websites (OTT), they love to pile it on.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If a picture is worth a thousand words, we could use about 47 pictures. Somebody has taken the phrase “web page” way too seriously. On the other hand, it doesn’t take the word “synopsis” seriously enough or it doesn’t understand the definition. Let me help them out.

You know you’re in for a fun time when you see a link entitled, “How to USE this Website.” Jokes and navigation share one thing in common: if you have to explain either one, it isn’t working.

On the other hand, for an OTT website, it looks better than most. Probably because the site eliminated the usual strobe color effects and animated GIFs.

Bolen Report

Submitter’s comments: I haven’t written to you in about a billion years, but I saw a new sub-site at Verizon today that made my eyes bleed. Enjoy becoming nauseous and jittery while viewing this!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The problems show up on a long portrait monitor. Your eye is drawn toward the numbered red squares. You instinctively mouse over them and the fly-out menus are ugly and the font is hideous. The body text is small and difficult to read because the color is #666—Satan’s CSS

Verizon is being “cute” with their navigation. If you know how the navigation works, then it’s easy to navigate.

Verizon