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

Submitter’s comments: Having attended the texass state fair, I came away with some things to look up… ride manufacturers!

I think that without a question Andernoch/Bruch/Düsseldorf comes in first. I visited their site and found an amazing number of things to be disgustingly scary.

The content area is about 90px.
On pretty much every page you view, there is sort of band of grayed out pictures. One would expect this to be a visual relief; however, it is actually MORE navigation. So, in addition to the existing navigation, there is also entire separate unlabeled navigation bar. And under this navigation bar on select pages there is another navigation bar. Holy shit! These guys just can’t get enough navigation.

On top of the poor usability, this site is like Photoshop-land! Every single page is a veritable carpet bomb of poorly airbrushed images, and badly designed logos; this site is the gift that keeps on taking. I’m sure you’ll continue accidentally locating new pages in this heap of crap.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The grayed out pictures are actually Mystery Meat Navigation, a term I’m proud to have coined.

As far as I can tell, the only way to find their content is to go to the sitemap and click either “Bilder” or “Technik” under the different rides.

This German site sucks. Or as Google Translate says, “Diese Website saugt.”

Oscar Bruch

Submitter’s comments: The sad thing is, these are most likely very nice people who just don’t have a clue about how to organize their information and present it in an appealing way.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s interesting. I can go from months without suggestions for two similar businesses and then…bam! A couple of days ago the Daily Sucker was Colorado Ranger Horse Association and today Cloud 9 Walkers shows up. What’s interesting about horse owners / lovers is their love of beautiful horses and ugly websites. Here are a few more I’ve posted about: : Horse Rentals, Lightning Bar Equine Services, All-Star Horse Farm, Lake Glendale Stables Equestrian Center and Castlewood Stables.

I realize the simplest unit of a website is a web page, but you don’t have to put everything on one page.

Cloud 9 Walkers

Submitter’s comments: This must be the worst website in history.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’m happy to report that this is not the worst website in history. I suspect you’ll find the worst website in history somewhere among the Worst Websites of 2012: April to August Contenders.

I first ventured onto the Internet in January 1995 and this site would fit right in. Unfortunately, this is 2012 and all this site does it make it look like this business is amateurish. That’s a shame because the quality of the artwork looks very professional. Still, would you want to do business with a site that looks like this? Especially since there are millions of templates and thousands of professional web designers available to fix this site.

The Woodturners Kauri Gallery and Working Studio

Submitter’s comments: This website is truly terrible. The only redeeming quality is the flashing stars in the background (not).

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Horses are beautiful animals. Websites about horses often look and smell like horse droppings. I’ve featured other massively sucky horse websites: Horse Rentals, Lightning Bar Equine Services, All-Star Horse Farm, Lake Glendale Stables Equestrian Center and Castlewood Stables. It looks like people who love beautiful horses love ugly web design.

Today’s sucker is horrible. I love the History page. Can we make the text smaller in size and leading? Jeez.

Colorado Ranger Horse Association

Submitter’s comments: The South Cafe in darkest Cornwall asks the visitor to ‘discover a hidden gem.’ Having discovered broken links from Bing maps and Trip Advisor, I found that www.south-cafe.co.uk isn’t quite dead – you just have to know to type www.south-cafe.co.uk/South_main.swf to get any content. Flash only content (which scales to fit the window, no matter how ridiculous the result) is bad enough: but no index page? A great way to stay hidden, indeed.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If there’s one thing every restaurant would kill for is to keep their restaurant from being found by search engines and visitors. I went to Google UK and searched for the site. The only non-restaurant review links I found were for www.south-cafe.co.uk and here’s what you get when you click that link.

Since it’s Flash-based, the site is useless on mobile. The “Menus” page’s own menu is difficult to read even though the text is large.

South Cafe