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

Submitter’s comments: Scunthorpe is a town in the north of England. The website is run by the media group which produces the weekly newspaper for the area. It had a major revamp a couple of years ago when they decided that what the town really needed was a long scrolling, box laden vomit fest of a site designed to make casual viewers wish for blindness.

“Features” include:

• a lag when scrolling caused by the interminable boxes
• links themed with a rainbow of good taste
• missing images (I didn’t see any but I didn’t try too hard <grin> – vf)
• random shop adverts and news stories strewn everywhere
• links which wander off onto other domain names e.g. try announcements
• links back which go to the wrong site e.g. try announcements, then Scunthorpe Telegraph Announcements, then try to get back, you will likely end up on thisisgrimsby instead.
• less than intelligent positioning of “useful links” and “most popular” stories.

I mean, I could go on…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ah…Scunthorpe. What a problem you are. The site uses a strange variant of Mystery Meat Navigation that I’ll call color-coded MMN. Most of the little sections on the home page have colored bars on the left side. These match up to the colors at the top and bottom of the page that’s called “Today in Scunthorpe.” Who is going to remember this system? Why would anyone in their right mind want to remember it?

One of the perils of this silly system is you put the wrong color code on an item.

The home page takes forever to load—even in England! The load time is 11.742 seconds in London (the first byte is 0.251). Ironically, it loaded faster from Washington, D.C. 8.846 seconds (but the first byte took longer at 0.383).

This is Scunthorpe