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

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s an important website. It’s one you should be reading. It’s one that’s difficult to read unless you’re on a laptop, Mac (I assume) or an iPhone (although the text is a little small).

What’s the problem. Contrast, of course. The home page is readable on my laptop—but it’s about five inches closer to my face than my desk monitor. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everything is fine if you’re close enough. But it fails the W3C guidelines for contrast. AccessColor reports that:

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 18.11% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 67.32% of the total the text.

You can see the first part of the results in this screenshot.

TNW has some front/backend issues, too. Yslow gives the home page a score of 59 and Page Speed gives it an 89. Yslow seems to score web pages like it’s the Olympics. Page Speed seems to score like it’s the Special Olympics.

The Next Web

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Back on July 4, I discussed a stupid web design feature I found on musician Robbie Robertson’s website. Here’s what I said:

Go to Robbie’s images from the 1970’s page. Take a look at the first photo entitled, “The Last Waltz.” Click on the picture. What do you get? Well, not what you’re expecting. If you’re like me, you think you’ll get a bigger version of the picture; otherwise, why is there a link? No. You get the same picture at the same size. What?

Today’s sucker is a little bit worse. Web Performance Today ran a very interesting and important article: Fourth-party calls: What you don’t know can hurt your site… and your visitors (make sure you read the article). In the middle of the page you’ll see a 480- x 352-pixel graphic (here’s a screenshot). If you click the picture to see the larger version, you get a slightly larger 667- x 486-pixel graphic that you really can’t read.

If you go to the original image on SlideShare and then click the full screen icon, you’ll get an image that’s 1095- x 806-pixels and you can read it.

If you’re going to make an image bigger, make it big enough to read and understand.

Web Performance Today – Fourth-party calls: What you don’t know can hurt your site… and your visitors

An eyetracking study that is very, very interesting. Hint: men like faces and women like shoes. It’s presented as a slideshow. http://read.bi/pQBpMq

They also examine a web site for an automobile. Ironically, women look longer at the car than men do.

Think about this in terms of your website.

Submitter’s comments: I believe this is intended to be a commercial site for a breeder of livestock dogs and pygmy goats. However, the site is such a hot mess that I can’t figure out whether it is personal or business.

Either way, I don’t believe I’ll be purchasing my next puppy from these folks.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I have never understood how someone could look at a home page like this and say, “Yes, this web page looks just fine.” No one has been able to explain this phenomenon to me. Then again, I just got an email from a site that’s a contender for Worst Website of 2011 and said he improved his website and wanted to know it still sucked. I swear to you that I can’t see a single change and even if it has changed it still sucks like Hurricane Katrina.

I can’t tell if this is a personal or business site—and that’s good enough to make it a Daily Sucker.

Livestock Guardian Angels

Submitter’s comments: Mystery Meat (Navigation) offender!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Holy Mother of God. I’ve been on the web since early 1995 and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that just when you think you’ve seen the stupidest website on the internet, something comes along that’s much worse.

Of course, today’s sucker is Flash-based, but I suspect that if Jonathan Gay saw what his creation hath wrought on this website, he’d poke his eyes out in embarrassment.

This website is one of the few that will give Xerox Real Business competition as the Worst Website of 2011. My favorite page is System for Success. Just go there, you’ll understand why.

SH Marketing