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

Submitter’s comments: I see MSY has been previously nominated for the Daily Sucker and even received an honorary award in 2009. MSY have updated their site from early-90s out-of-date in 2009 to late-90s out-of-date now in 2014. They’re catching up! At this rate they may hit contemporary within 15-20 years.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Nicely phrased. MSY would have made the regular Worst of 2009 list except they changed it enough by the end of the year so I thought the new version didn’t qualify so I put it on the Honorary list.

This screenshot of the 2009 MSY website shows why it sucked back in the day. The “worst” design element is that the page won’t fit on a 1200px monitor so you have to horizontally scroll. The home page doesn’t do very well on Google’s PageSpeed Insights (you also get to see a screenshot of what the page looks like on an Android device).

MSY Technology

Submitter’s comments: Is this a bad website?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yes.

I’ve loved magic since I was a little boy. In fact, I love it so much I refused to watch the TV show "Secrets of Magic Revealed" (or whatever it was called) so it’s disappointing to see this website suck.

The 15Mb home page takes 26 seconds to load (per WebPageTest). The pictures at the top—where the navigation should be located—are not links, which you would expect them to be. The navigation starts at around 640px from the top of the page. Yeah, that’s where all the web design books tell you to place the navigation. Oh, and the page is ~31,674 pixels long (on a 1200px wide monitor) and even with the monitor being 1200px wide, I still have to scroll horizontally. Not good.

The rest of the page contains the usual suspects of bad web design.

The Magic of Baltimore

Submitter’s comments: Is it just me or can you find an obvious way to sign up? Tell me it isn’t just me! I was waving money in front of the monitor and everything!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s not really you. I HATE websites that don’t want to take my money. I’ve had several instances where the order form blew up when I clicked the payment button. I had to scroll to the bottom of the page and there I found the magic word “Support.” Clicking that link led me to your usual knowledge base-type article where I had to scroll down and click “How much is a Premium subscription?”

They need to put a Signup/Login or Support button at the top of the page.

Webshots

Submitter’s comments: Their mystery navigation is that it has left people I know clicking what they thought was a menu to important links that took them nowhere. A friend of mine contacted me today to ask if I ever had problems pulling up certain pages on the Web site. Upon examination, there is a long menu list of pages you can go to that don’t even have hyperlinks.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The menu links running across the top work, but the links on the right side don’t seem to work. Initially, I thought this was an old, dead website but there are event dates scheduled for 2014. Not sure I understand why they made this mistake, but not having links is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

Christian County GOP

Submitter’s comments: I stumbled upon something so unbelievably bad, well, I still can’t believe it. It’s the new site “Canada: A creative nation” made by the government of Canada.

Usually, you would expect an official government web site to at least look professional. This one illustrates perfectly how, when you try to “be creative”, breaking all usability and web design principles is a great way to distinguish yourself… indeed, this is a unique site, one that all Canadians can be proud of. :-)

Try the French version as well as the English one, so you get to appreciate this wonderful site in both of our official languages. By the way, none of the links a the bottom of the page are working…. some link to ‘#”, some link to non existing pages… nice :-)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Oh boy. It’s bad enough it takes forever to load, but then you get some good old skeuomorphic web design. Like we’re idiots or something. Please take a look at the subpages and try to navigate in the rooms.

Canada: A Creative Nation