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

Submitter’s comments: I was researching website design for a project I am doing and stumbled across this website. I’m not sure where to look because my gaze keeps going from one paragraph to another trying to figure out where to look as they all seem to compete for attention.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s your stereotypic crappy-looking website. A blind man would be offended by the color scheme. Check out the subpages, especially the “Small But Important Details” page.

I’ve often asked myself, “Why can’t we see that our web pages suck?” I’ve never figured out the answer to this question. The closest I’ve come is an article “Why can we predict other people’s behavior more accurately than our own?” To paraphrase, when we view other people’s behavior we consider the context. With our own behavior, we don’t.

In the world of web design, we can see other people’s mistakes, but not our own, because we’re too close and too familiar with our own pages. We can use our critical eye on another site, but our critical eye goes blind on our site.

Valley Isle Aquatics

After I typed the link, Satori hit me. The existence of bad web design can be explained by the following:

Submitter’s comments: Bad design, good prices

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s your stereotypic crappy-looking gun website. It mostly consists of one long page and looks like it was created back in late 1995.

I went to Google and typed in [guns NC] and didn’t find today’s sucker listed. What I did find was the Hyatt Gun Shop, which was the #1 search result. It won’t win any Webbys for design, but it won’t get listed on this site (unless there’s something horrible I didn’t see during my cursory visit). Hyatt’s look should be inspirational to Classic Firearms.

Classic Firearms

Here’s a link to one of my YouTube videos about another gun site.

Submitter’s comments: No mystery here. Ouch. Very 1990’s.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It is very 1990’s. I’m old-fashioned. I like my background images to tile without noticeable seams. I like for my pages to have a consistent look, although since the site uses frames I know I haven’t left the site when I click on a link in the left frame. When I click on the “Klamath Chamber” link, I’m taken to a page where one of the top links is “Sample Page” and that’s exactly what it is.

Trees of Mystery

Submitter’s comments: I used Google to search for “best learn spanish sites” and the top result was this page.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Somebody in the SEO community needs to figure out why this website ranks so high. It violates every positive web design concept we have. The site’s success also makes me believe the Web Standards gods are full of it. Yes, there’s content—plenty of it—but it’s mostly on the home page. A very long home page that weighs in at approximately 6Mb. A home page that has a Page Speed score of 50 and 2,673 errors.

All I should have to say to prove it sucks are two simple words—”Comic Sans.” There’s even an error I don’t recall seeing before. There are six graphics titled “Links” but none of them are actually links.

I even thought that the search query was a little funky. I tried [best websites to learn spanish] and it came up #2. Seriously, there’s something going on here that might be very important to the SEO community.

Best Spanish Websites

NVEnergize – An Example of Bad Web Design for April 15, 2012

Submitter’s comments: AHHHHHH!

What rule doesn’t this website break? Constant scrolling whilst you move your mouse, plus the loading page just looks like the whole website (because who’s going to think that a barometer {I think it is} going upward SLOOOOOOOOWLY is a loading page?)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Initially, I wasn’t sure if this qualified. Then I started scrolling and ran into a bunch of Mystery Meat Navigation. The worst culprit is “Renewable Generation.” You have to mouse over the first solar panel to bring up the tooltip. You would think that it would be enough to mouse over any other part of the building. Nope. That seems like an incredible oversight and I can’t believe someone at NVEnergy didn’t notice. When you mouse over the house to the right, there’s no link. You have to go up to the top of the hill for “Traditional Generation.”

Finally, why are they using the secure https protocol?

NVEnergize