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

Submitter comments: After seeing this site, my engagement is off! I now totally, absolutely, 100% vow a life of celibacy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I remember the priests and nuns at my Catholic grade school telling us that if we thought we were facing immanent death, we should say an Act of Contrition and our sins would be forgiven — or something like that. After viewing this site the only thing that’s keeping me alive is the thought of death.

You have to love the keyword stuffing that’s going on. Most people try to hide the fact. Because of all the color combinations on the page, they just put the keywords at the bottom.

You must click the ENTER YVETTE’S link and see the home page. OMG. This site is a shoo-in for inclusion Worst Web Sites of 2008.

Yvette’s

Another great Seth Godin post — you are reading his blog aren’t you?

The trap: Use all your money to build a fancy website and leave no money or patience for the hundred revisions you’ll need to do.

The trap: read the tech blogs and fall in love with the bleeding-edge hip sites and lose focus on the long-term players that deliver real value.

Definitely not a Daily Sucker.

The secret of the web

To celebrate the beginning of WebPagesThatSuck’s 13th year I thought I’d go through my vault of bad web design and show you some of the classics.

Sadly, a lot of the mistakes you’ll see are still being made 13 years later. Fortunately, most of the companies I’ll feature learned the errors of their way and fixed their sites. They’re hoping and praying that these mistakes will remain buried because they don’t show up in Archive.org.

My first example is from 1998 and the company in question is Janus — “a global investment manager offering institutional and intermediary clients and individual investors complementary asset management disciplines including growth and risk-managed strategies.” Really? You’d never know it by looking at their site.

Here’s the YouTube video (and here are more of my videos at YouTube)

A nicer and higher resolution version at WebPagesThatSuck.TV

I’m not the only person who recognizes that architects have problems with their web sites. treehugger takes architects to task over their web sites. I’m going to add these suckers to my Bad Architects Sites.

Here are some more articles about bad architectural web sites: bd and the Guardian.

I just got up from a cough-syrup-induced coma (I’ve got bronchitis) and realized that today marks the beginning of the 13th year of WPTS.

I’m reminded of what some famous musician (Roger McGuinn of the Byrds?) said: “Make sure you like the songs you record because you might have to sing them every night for the next 40 years.”

Back in 1996 I thought this site would be up for a couple of weeks since it was an adjunct to my HTML class. I wanted to show bad web design examples and I wanted to come up with an edgy domain name. The rest is history.

In the beginning I received a lot of complaints about the site’s name. Thanks to Bill Clinton, Beavis and Butt-Head, and American culture, I can’t remember the last time anyone found the name objectionable.

It’s been an interesting ride. Thanks.