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

Submitter’s comments: This site sucks. The graphics are not optimized, they have enormous drop down menus, and their flashy slider graphic bogs my entire system down.

On top of that, it is ugly and looks poorly put together.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It could have been a nice looking and functional website. It’s still nice looking, but the flaws ruin the experience.

We have contrast severe contrast issues—the dark text is difficult to read over the black/blackish background. Eduworks needs to get rid of their graphics carousel (slider). Everybody needs to get rid of their carousels. Why? Because carousels are bad for Search Engine Optimization and for usability. I’m not just blowing smoke out of my rear end (although I do have that ability). The highly regarded Search Engine Land wrote up some research that said carousels suck—or words to that effect. Oh, they’re not alone. Google has about a million articles on the topic.

Allegedly the site is constructed so it works on mobile devices. I base this conclusion on the following source code:

 Mobile Specific Metas
meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1″

Did anybody use an iPhone and look at the Eduworks website? NFW (No Way). FAIL.

There are some serious problems that aren’t obvious. No, the lack of contrast on the drop-down menus is obvious. PageSpeed are tools by Google to “Analyze and optimize your website…to implement the web performance best practices.” In the beginning, PageSpeed gave out fairly low scores, but people made a ruckus and it now appears to me that PageSpeed’s scores are like American college report cards where grades are inflated. Well, not Eduworks’ PageSpeed score. It’s an unbelievable 28 out of 100. I haven’t seen that low of a score in…well…a very, very long time. I know Google doesn’t want us to use PageSpeed scores as a rating mechanism, but a 28?

Eduworks-UK Ltd.