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

Submitter’s comments: Even a black hole doesn’t suck as much as the nbcnews.com redesign. You really have to view this atrocity to understand – that is, if you aren’t using FireFox on OS X because it won’t load in that anymore. Also complaints exist of it not working with Safari, or with Nexus phones.

This redesign has all the makings of the most epic website failure of 2014, and it’s only February!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: A lot of people submitted this site—probably because the NBC owns the rights to televise the Olympics here in the United States and people want to see streaming videos (they can’t unless they have a cable subscription).

I’m not terribly fond of the currently hip Card design technique, which is most often seen on Pinterest and is touted in the article Why Cards Are The Future of the Web as…well…the future of the web. On NBCnews the cards at least line up across each row and that’s better than Vevo where they don’t exactly line up. I know there are sites where the cards are all jumbled up, but I can’t find any at the moment. I find it hard to read Cards on a desktop monitor. You’re eyes are always scanning back and forth and I’d say it seems like Cards were meant for people with ADD except that I have ADD and scanning cards sucks.

I was pleased to discover that the site doesn’t use “infinite navigation” (the page goes on forever and the agony never ends) on the home page; instead, they have a “Load More” button at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case on most (all?) of the other pages. Click the menu icon and then click “Tech & Science” and you’ll be taken to a page that scrolls forever. That sucks.

The navigation gets much worse. Click on any story—I clicked on Report: Target Hackers Slipped In Via Vent … Maintenance Company and started reading. At the end of the story I was shocked to discover that other full-length stories about security followed. WTF? Are you kidding me?

I understand Card design can be really useful for mobile devices and that’s one of the points the “…Future of the Web” article touts. There’s only one problem here. I ran Page Speed on the home page and the mobile version scored 46/100 and the desktop version scored 66/100. Hell, my poorly designed (and I’m proud that it is) home page scores 83/100 on mobile and 94/100 on the desktop.

Oh, yeah. Check out the article, With one day to go, the official NBC Olympics app is a bit of a mess.

It’s going to be a long year.

NBC News