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

Submitter’s comments: Unfortunately, I am submitting the recent redesign of my college’s campus store site. Every student in the college uses this site to find the necessary course material for each semester and, frankly, this site is an atrocious (example: small blue links on a red background)

Hopefully some outside opinion will make them consider another update!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’m hoping that the garish colors used here are the school colors. Even if they are the colors, you don’t have to use them on a bookstore. I don’t know what the relationship is between this school and RISD (Rhode Island School of Design—a Daily Sucker ten years ago), but somebody needs to help out this campus store.

A quick look at the home page found at least one typo (“locatedon”). Did I mention that the colors suck and the text doesn’t look like it’s styled with CSS (text rubs up next to box borders), but there are two stylesheets. Both of them suck too.

Rhode Island College Campus Store

Submitter’s comments: The site is using an image map for everything. This site was seriously released in the past few weeks which makes it even more unacceptable.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I didn’t know anybody still used this 1994 technique. Jeez. Can we make our site more difficult for the search engines to find? What about typos? If there are any, you have to edit the image. For example, on the “About” page it should read “industry-wide reputation.” You need the hyphen. There are run-on sentences

I typed “energy land services” into Google and didn’t find them in the first 200 listings.

CW Lake

Submitter’s comments: My father works as an electrical tester and was looking for some new equipment, he stumbled across this in his searches:

You can clearly see that, at some point, a professional helped to design this site and, over time, someone or something has just torn their work to shreds.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I agree. It looks like they had links called “Latest” and “Featured” and “Special Products” that went to subpages. Not now. They added these to the home page and then started listing items. Then they mucked up the center column by adding information about the company and ordering information. They basically threw in the kitchen sink. The subpages are equally messy.

I’m trying to cram in some sites before the year ends to try to get them into consideration for the Worst Websites of 2012.

Testermans

Submitter’s comments: OMG, when I saw this website, I googled “nominate the worst website” and found you. Given what I hoped to find at Fritz Haeg’s website, I was sorely dismayed.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: NOTE: It looks like they’re redirecting their home page to their wiki.

Here’s a link to a quickie video showing the site before the redirection.

I’m trying to cram in some sites before the year ends to try to get them into consideration for the Worst Websites of 2012.

We have Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN), pages with different colored backgrounds (at least they match the MMN) and when you mouse over the MMN menu, the background color of the home page (or any other page) temporarily changes. Fritz designs gardens. I hope they don’t suck like his website.

Fritz Haeg

Submitter’s comments: This new site for a high performance driving school make me wonder if the techniques they teach are as out of date as their design savvy. They’ve managed to incorporate many of your website faux pas greatest hits: animated GIFs, centered text, (even centered bullet lists!), questionable color pallet (lime green text over mustard yellow text on black backgrounds), page dividers, contrast errors (dark blue text on background) and more. Makes me dizzy just looking at it:

Vincent Flanders’ comments: When my first daughter turned 16, I wanted to send her to the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving to learn how to drive during bad weather, car chases and other extreme conditions common to Southern California (where we were living). Bob was a 1960’s American Formula 1 driver—and there weren’t a lot of them. I knew that his school could teach her everything she would need to know. While I knew his school was good, I discovered I couldn’t afford it. Every once in a long while when I’m in a car with her during bad weather she reminds me.

I’m sure Mr. Swanson’s school can teach you what you need to know. I’m sure it’s quite good. I’m also sure that I would never use his services after looking at his website.

Here’s the easy way to review his site. Just compare his site with Bob Bondurant’s.

Don Swanson Racing School

Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving

Which one looks like a professional organization? Which one makes you say, “Damn! I want to sign up!” As I often say, “If you don’t look like a pro, the people will go.”

Don Swanson Racing School