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

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I clicked an article link on Hacker News and it took me to a site called Good Stuff. Wrong. Bad stuff. Very bad stuff. I couldn’t read the freaking text. I’ve called #666 Satan’s CSS, but this guy uses #777—which is an order of magnitude worse. AccessColor failed their site and here’s the screenshot.

The guy calls himself a geek. Wrong, again. He’s an ArtFart. ArtFarts are the opposite of designers. They waste your time by being pretentious, obtuse and other pretentious words. Real web designers understand the term contrast and use it in their work. A new website has taken up my cause about contrast and it’s called, logically enough, Contrast Rebellion. Since ArtFarts think graphically, maybe if they look at Contrast Rebellion they’ll understand the importance of contrast and change their ways.

If you’re going to write, let me read your text.

Good Stuff

Submitter’s comments: My husband is into mountain biking and bike-packing and has been shopping for bike bags lately. He loves the products made by Carousel Design Works…or he probably would if he could order them. I present you the product site that won’t let you buy products.

This is a great example of sucking. At first glance it seems like this is a really nice site…but I dare you to try and buy something…seriously, you can’t do it. What’s the point of showing off your awesome products if no one can order them? All they have is a Flickr page with photos of the great things that you can’t have. My husband finally found a PDF download of their “order form” and most of the items m are sold out and there’s no info on how to actually place an order.

What a strange company website. Maybe one day we’ll get to own one of their fantastic bags, if we can just find a dang “Buy Now” button somewhere on the site…even a phone number or other directions for ordering would be good, but you’re not going to find that here.

Oh, and just to make it better the blog has one post that’s been there since the site’s inception. Way to go Carousel Design Works, you did a good job creating a whole bunch of nothing. I guess we’ll buy our bags somewhere else.

Thanks for listening to my rant

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s not a rant if you’re right. I tried to figure out how to buy something. I found how much items cost, but no link to buy. I spent about five minutes in my search—which is 4 minutes 40 seconds too long.

I don’t understand what’s going on. Maybe it’s a northern California wine country thing.

Carousel Design Works