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

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Here’s a website that showed up in my RSS program. It was listed with other “remarkable” websites. My only remark was “Holy Mother of God, my iPad’s screen has gone haywire because I can’t read the tag line and the text.”

The home page looks better on my desktop PC. It’s “better” in the sense that it’s better to weigh 242 instead of 250 lbs. I can at least read the tag line, which makes me wonder: Was the site created on a desktop and never checked on the iPad? This is weird because the app is for the iPad. Huh? The website sucks on the very platform the app is supposed to run.

Where’s the logo? Is it that yellow triangle at the top? Also, why is the picture of the app all blurry? I would think the image would be crisper than a new $100 bill.

It’s not a HealthCare.gov fiasco, but there’s one similarity: did anybody ever look at the home page before launch?

Firepaper App

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I received a newsletter about all these cool new websites. As soon as I see words like “cool” or any other superlative like “amazing” or “inspirational” I know I’m going to find Daily Sucker material.

I thought Flip-Universum was a Flash-based site until I looked at the source code. It’s all HTML5 trickery. I’m really impressed with the talent it took to create this home page. Really, really impressed. Unfortunately, the website sucks. The home page takes a long, long time to load (10 seconds according to WebPageTest) and clocks in at almost 5Mb. It took over a minute to load on my iPhone 4.

Of course, I can’t pass mentioning the Mystery Meat Navigation that permeates the page. On my iPhone, the mouseover doesn’t work the way it does on the desktop, which means your cool effect is wasted.

Yes, there are navigation bars at the top so you can skip the cutesy animation, but they’re wasted. Your eye goes to the animation and you get sucked into a black hole. I was so enchanted by the animations I didn’t stop and find out what this company or organization or whatever does. I think that defeats the purpose of having a website.

Flip-Universum

Vincent Flanders’ comments: A few days ago, I anointed Healthcare.gov as The Worst Website of 2013. In the interest of bipartisanship, I’m nominating conservative Senator Ted Cruzes’ mobile website as the Daily Sucker. Why? Because the website is making the biggest mistake a mobile website can make: the navigation is not at the top, but at the bottom of the page.

While Senator Cruzes’ home page on a standard monitor wouldn’t make the Daily Sucker, the ruled line motif sucks. Still, I can live with it. On the other hand, his mobile website has one huge problem. Cruzes’ mobile website doesn’t have the menu at the top of the page, but at the bottom. Unless you have something to hide (would a U.S. Senator have anything to hide?) or you don’t want people to find the navigation because…well, you fill in the blanks…then it has to go at the top of the page.

Heck, even my soon-to-be-released-one-of-these-days-mobile website doesn’t make this mistake:

Having the navigation is the wrong place is one of the biggest mistakes you can make with your mobile website design.

Oh, I used “Cruzes'” after looking at several grammar websites. I’m not sure I like it or it’s right, but as one editor told me “I don’t care what you do as long as you do it every time.”

Senator Ted Cruzes’ Website

Vincent Flanders’ comments: C’mon, you knew I had to do it even though the year isn’t over. How could I NOT name HealthCare.gov as the Worst Website of 2013?

If you can spell “web design,” you know you’re supposed to test your website before it goes live. Testing it for the first time one week before launch does not count as testing. Even my mother, who spent most of her career as a keypunch operator, knows better than to wait until the last minute to test a website and she’s been dead for 20 years.

If a corporate website sucks or fails to work, employees are the people who are usually hurt (I’m over-simplifying a bit). When a nonprofit website sucks or fails to work it hurts a larger group of people outside the company – the clients they’re trying to help – and these people are generally already hurting or they wouldn’t need the non-profit’s services. It’s more important for a non-profit website to “get it right.”

That’s why it’s so upsetting that HealthCare.gov doesn’t work. This website’s failure will hurt real people and, dammit, government is supposed to help people. (Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can argue about government’s role in helping people another day.)

HealthCare.gov

Submitter’s comments: I’m not given to hyperbole but even so, this is unquestionably the worst website in the entire solar system. What the hell is this?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s something that someone who loves Mystery Meat Navigation would love—an indecipherable mess. I say “indecipherable” because when you click on any graphic on the screen, you’re taken to the same, mysterious place. I don’t know what’s going on.

Yes, in the past I’ve said “art” sites and “personal” websites are excluded from criticism. However, I now feel that there’s no excuse for “stupid” and it has to be called out.

John Procario