Worst Websites of the Year
Worst Websites of the Year: 2011-2005
Worst WebsitesDaily Dose of Bad Design (Daily Sucker)
Current Examples of Bad Web Design Presented Daily (direct link)
Bad Web Design
Overview (direct link)
Worst Websites of 2010: Group 2 Contenders
These gems turds of web design were selected from sites appearing on The Daily Sucker from September 2010 to December 15, 2010.
The fact I could easily find another 12 sites that suck enough to be considered along with the sites in The Worst Websites of 2010 doesn't bode well for the future of web design. Gee. I can't wait for sites to start using HTML5 and CSS3.
1. omniFEEDBACK: Start The Change
I was reading this article about “inspirational Flash sites” (an oxymoron) when I noticed that potential Worst Website of 2010, Got Milk?, was featured. To its credit, there were actually some Flash sites that weren't bad—mostly because they refrained from using Mystery Meat Navigation.
Then I ran across OmniFeedback. I realize video is the future of the web, but I don't think a 5Mb infomercial does anyone any good. The 29.89 seconds the site takes to load the page doesn't make me love it.
Yes, it's beautiful, but so what?
Other comments #1: Maybe I should have dropped acid before staring at the rotating orange disks. I only made it about 15 seconds into the actual advert. Maybe there is a site there, but I have even less patience for "Coming attractions" in my chair at work than at the theater. If there's a place on that site where they could transfer money from my pocket to theirs -- the only reason to have a business site -- then they would have just lost me to a competitor. Really. Someone is *already* at your site -- no need to sell them on how wonderful you are!
Other comments #2: Anyone who has played Fallout 3 (a huge hit in the gaming world) will recognize waaaaay too many similarities in look and feel. The folks at omniFEEDBACK get a great big FAIL for this one, and Bethesda Softworks might have a little something to say about it sooner or later.
Other comments #2: Be forewarned, I cranked up the online stopwatch for my slow machine but went into a stupor and began drooling before I realized the 17.401 MB presentation had finished loading, at 3:43. The second time, the loading time was accurately timed to 3:22. I did read the information board, but it took a few seconds to click the X. That damned robin never did fly off. After I read the board, I clicked the X and then clicked the 'seller' button. That spiel ended when the old house appeared 4.09 minutes later.
No doubt the video was constructed for company management to watch. The problem is the program creators assume that all the potential buyers are running a quadcore processor and 4 gigs of RAM plus whizbang video cards. The real world ain't like that. Viewers don't upgrade machines so they can watch Flash presentations.
2. Pearl Brite
Submitter's comments: I can't believe people are still doing this…will the bad designers never learn?!
Vincent Flanders' comments: Actually, it might be bad clients. What's interesting is there's actually a lot of real text that could be indexed and Google has improved their ability to index Flash text. Although that's nice, does it matter? I asked myself the question, What's the difference between Adobe Flash and my mother? Flash is dead, but it just doesn't know it. I'm proud to have been among the first to shoot Flash—long before the Web Standardistas started piling on.
Also, Mystery Meat Navigation should never be used.
Other comments #1: That truly is a fine sucker. An excellent example of Mystery Meat that has a seriously irritating backing track. Although you can turn the sound off, you can't turn off the stupid fly-zapping sizzling sounds when the balls meet. It really is quite appalling and unusable. On the plus side, the moving balls can put you into a Zen trance if you watch them for too long....
Other comments #2: It's got all my favorites. Faded text, random position page links, vertical scrolling columns in iframes, Involuntary background music that never quits, it's slow to open and 59% of every page is wasted. What a hard-to-read, slow loading piece of crap.
Other comments #3: Surprisingly for a Flash site, it is too tall for my laptop screen. Is there something to be said about the egos that drive teeth-whitening would be the ones asking for a site like this? (Wow, this post made it to "What's Hot in Google Reader"!)
3. Pizzeria San Francisco
I'm willing to bet a lot of money that these folks make really good pizza. If you're in San Francisco, you have to be good to survive. If you look at their website… well, nobody would stay on it long enough to find out if their pizza was any good.
I gave up waiting for the whole site to load after 75.78 seconds (I used the Charles Proxy to time it) and 16.46Mb of videos, images, and the kitchen sink, which are all crammed into one page. For a business that deals with menus, you'd think they'd understand the concept and put a navigational menu on their home page.
I love the note, “Please refresh your browser if slideshow fails to load.” Obviously, they know there's a problem, but they think that people want to reload their browser just to see a slide show. Sorry. The only slideshow people will go through that kind of effort to see features naked and/or dead bodies.
Update: Once again, another site has gone through a redesign. Archive.org managed to capture most of the offending home page.
On the plus side, it's easy to find their phone number <grin>. Well, it isn't easy if you have an iPad—you can't read the number.
It's important to look professional.
Other comments #1: Dammit, now I'm hungry! The pizza does look fabulous, too. With a little thought and simple reorganization this site could be a whole lot better.
Other comments #2: The logo at the top is 1900x1700 scaled down. OMG
Other comments #3: They also need to lose the keyword stuffing at the bottom of the page.
Pizzeria San Francisco (The original site as captured by Archive.org)
Pizzeria San Francisco (Current, improved site)
Pizzeria San Francisco (The original site as captured by Archive.org)
Pizzeria San Francisco (Current, improved site)
4. Ben the Bodyguard
I click this Twitter link that sounds interesting. It's about protecting your iPhone's information and since I'm thinking of getting and iPhone, I go to the site. The site's well done and it doesn't bother me that I have to scroll down the page for what seems like forever because it's telling a clever story.
The problem is quite simple. When I get to the bottom of the page I find out THE FREAKING PRODUCT ISN'T OUT YET!!! YOU'RE WASTING MY TIME!
This isn't high school. Don't product-tease me. I really don't like it. I'm willing to bet that this site gets a lot of positive press because of its cleverness. I love clever—but only when there's a punch line. There's no reward here.
Added this before posting: There's a button on the site that says it's been “Liked” 6K times and bit.ly says it's shortened the URL 22,538 times. Well, we know there are at least 6,000 usability idiots out there.
The site will be "fixed" in January 2011.
Other comments #1: Clever, indeed! Still, I honestly cannot add anything to your comments, Vincent; they sum up the situation well.
Other comments #2: Very clever. I've never seen anything like it.
As for Vincent's comments, I suspect what's happened here is that the Marketing Department has decided to try to create some buzz before the launch. I agree that this is completely annoying from an end-user point of view. A perfect example of launching a website to meet their own goals, rather than their users' goals.
5. Abercrombie & Fitch
Submitter's comments: What were they thinking?
Vincent Flanders' comments: I dunno. Maybe that we all have 60/20 vision?
From what I can see, the whole f***ing site's this way. If this site's head was any higher up its ass, it could kiss its tonsils.
Other comments #1: Very sad and disappointing. Problem #1 I CAN'T READ YOUR !@#!#%# SITE, SO I CAN'T BUY ANY OF YOUR PRODUCTS.
On a more positive note, I applaud the designer for having the chutzpah to present this site as a finished product, and then fool AF into paying for it. Bravo!
Other comments #2: I wouldn't even know it was an Abercrombie site if you hadn't told me or if I didn't look at the URL.
6. Soulwax 2007
Submitter's comments: Ack. my spleen hurts. I found this via The Horizontal Way, which may be an award-winning gateway for worse offenders.
Vincent Flanders' comments: First, it's NSFW because it's a music site, so take note. Second, it demonstrates the worst type of ego masturbation—trying to be cool when you aren't. You're just a band and you're not that talented. These jerkoffs need to read Bands and Artists Websites – Showcase and Best Practices and find out what real bands are doing with their websites. Even U2, who had one of the most pretentious and stupid Flash sites a few years back, now has a real website.
Soulwax's home page is even worse (TOTALLY NSFW). It takes forever to load and it just loops and loops and not even the moderately attractive girls shaking their T&A make me want to wait until the next clip is available.
Oh, and the award-winning The Horizontal Way is definitely to blame. As far as awards go, Death to Design Awards is spot on as is this Open Letter. The only web awards worth winning are located here, here and here. Grab your award like the one on the left.
7. Child Murder Victims
Submitter's comments: Most sites are bad because of strange aesthetics that diminish usability. For this one I have to ask, did anyone even look at the results?
Vincent Flanders' comments: Maybe they never looked at the page because the topic is gruesome and sickening.
Since it's an easy problem to fix, here's a screen capture in case they fix it.
Other comments #1: No other way to put it…this is really bad. A topic this serious merits a more thoughtful and intelligent treatment.
Other comments #2: Unbelievable. Surely the "designer" looked at the results in a web browser?
Other comments #3: Try clicking some of the menus. I selected one of the other pages, then I selected Child Abuse and then Child Murder Victims. Now, the background is white.
I am not sure how they did this. It looks like an excessively complicated web template. I cannot view the source code from IE6 here at work.
8. Tamke-Allan Observatory
Vincent Flanders' comments: Conveniently, the article Less is More: The Return of The One Page Website just came out. While one-page sites are making a comeback, they don't look anything like the observatory's one page. The observatory is trying to cram everything from the kitchen sink to the telescope into the page. The article's examples are tasteful.
Today's sucker is certainly a classic example of Mistake #6 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Have you ever seen another website? Really? Doesn't look like it.“
We have multicolored text that's centered and flush left. Fortunately, the links seem to be underscored because if they weren't, we wouldn't know what's a link and what's a heading. While the text seems to be readable because of its size, AccessColor says the page doesn't have enough contrast:
- Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 22.62% of the total text.
- Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 6.56% of the total the text.
I have a new mantra about this type of site: “If Jesus' website looked like this, Christianity wouldn't exist today.”
Other comments #1: The 'Web Ring' at the bottom of the page tells you how old this site is.
Other comments #2: That was my first thought, that this was a relic from 1997, but the page was last updated only 10 days ago. So, it appears that despite the high tech telescope, the apes are still swinging jaw bones at the Internet. (You would think that even at Roane State -- whatever that is -- they could get some sophomore BCS student to redo the website for extra credit ...)
9. CSS3, Please!
There's nothing worse than a website that actually has content—real content—but you can't read it. When I ran the home page through AccessColor I got the following report:
The W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness.
Based on these considerations, the results for this page are:
1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 47.1% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 32.82% of the total the text.
Nothing pisses me off more than folks telling everyone to support web standards when they fail to support the most elementary standard of all—being able to read the text.
CSS3, Please Let Me Read You!
Other comments #1: You'd think someone focusing on CSS would not do that. Great, great tool, tho. I'm bookmarking that one for future needs!
10. New Town Primary School
Vincent Flanders' comments: If the movie character Zatoichi, a blind Japanese anma and bakuto who is skilled in iaido, were a usability analyst, how would he fix New Town's website? (NSFW)
11. Truthism
Submitter's comments: Thought I'd suggest it in case you hadn't seen it. I don't know if poor design really applies since there doesn't appear to be any design. It's really just one long, segmented diatribe.
Vincent Flanders' comments: I'll give you a real truthism: If your website looks like this, it's a sucky over-the-top website.
Other comments #1: Ugly and it takes quite a bit of reading to discover that the world is controlled by reptilians. It is so good mannered of authors to state their thesis in a synopsis at the start of the document.
A good rule of thumb would be that a website is allowed one aspersion on our intelligence. With the second, or any use of the word "sheeple", we should all stop reading.
It violates Vincent's rule about men from Mars and about keeping the entire main page within the first screen. If it had had a synopsis at the top, the people eager to read about reptilians would have found the page to be Heroin Content.
Other comments #2: Well, I must admit that I have never until now seen a website that goes to such elaborate lengths to insult its visitors in just about every conceivable way, not to mention damage their retinas and tax their patience to the extreme.
The truth, if I may use the word somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is that this ugly website is poorly thought out, poorly executed and is not intended to convince anyone of anything. Like so many other bad sites, it serves only to burnish the ego of its creator(s).
12. Rent Is 2 Damn High
Submitter's comments: Check out this lovely site for the “Rent is too DAMN High” Political Party in New York City.
Vincent Flanders' comments: I refuse to watch political shows on TV, but I happened to catch this politician during a video clip on late-night cable show Chelsea Lately. His website reminds me of Basil Marceaux's website (he ran for governor of Tennessee), which is another good example of over-the-top web design.
On the other hand, you have to give him credit for being a refreshing breath of New York City air.