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

Submitter’s comments: Scunthorpe is a town in the north of England. The website is run by the media group which produces the weekly newspaper for the area. It had a major revamp a couple of years ago when they decided that what the town really needed was a long scrolling, box laden vomit fest of a site designed to make casual viewers wish for blindness.

“Features” include:

• a lag when scrolling caused by the interminable boxes
• links themed with a rainbow of good taste
• missing images (I didn’t see any but I didn’t try too hard <grin> – vf)
• random shop adverts and news stories strewn everywhere
• links which wander off onto other domain names e.g. try announcements
• links back which go to the wrong site e.g. try announcements, then Scunthorpe Telegraph Announcements, then try to get back, you will likely end up on thisisgrimsby instead.
• less than intelligent positioning of “useful links” and “most popular” stories.

I mean, I could go on…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ah…Scunthorpe. What a problem you are. The site uses a strange variant of Mystery Meat Navigation that I’ll call color-coded MMN. Most of the little sections on the home page have colored bars on the left side. These match up to the colors at the top and bottom of the page that’s called “Today in Scunthorpe.” Who is going to remember this system? Why would anyone in their right mind want to remember it?

One of the perils of this silly system is you put the wrong color code on an item.

The home page takes forever to load—even in England! The load time is 11.742 seconds in London (the first byte is 0.251). Ironically, it loaded faster from Washington, D.C. 8.846 seconds (but the first byte took longer at 0.383).

This is Scunthorpe

Submitter’s comments: So here’s an excellent example of a horrid website. My boyfriend took one look at it (and its autoplay music was going) and he asked, “…is this for a night club?” Nope. It’s a photographer/fashion site.

And you can barely tell what kind of site it is until you get to the portfolio section, which doesn’t even have a means of navigating once you have selected portraits/fashion/glamor or whatever the options are. The portraits one was a nightmare. I found myself spinning my cursor in circles just to try and get a quick glimpse of each picture. Why do people think that sites like this get them business!? You need an easy to navigate your site so that your business is accessible to everyone. What were they thinking, webpagesthatsuck.com!? WHAT WERE THEY THINKIIIING!?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I initially thought it was a website for a gay dance club in downtown Seattle (it’s an interesting story—five guys and girls went out dancing and we had a great time). When I looked at the URL—SugarYourSpice—I thought it might be a site for an adult novelty store (like Lovers in Puyallup—it’s an interesting story…). Nope. They provide hair and makeup for photo shoots.

I don’t know their clientele, but I don’t think their current website would be as effective as something simple and straightforward. Actually, I’m going to propose they keep their Flashy silly site and create a regular site and give folks the option of choosing which one they want. This is the rare type of site that can benefit by having a normal, HTML-based site and a showy Flash site.

Sugar & Spice is NSFW (slightly)

Submitter’s comments: This site is a rainbow-licious flavor of suckiness. Yikes! And thanks for your service to the Internet :-)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is an internal page for a company that makes “100% blended fruit juice concentrate that is specifically designed for childcare centers, preschools, Head Starts, etc.” Since many of those in their target audience are too young to read, I don’t understand the need for rainbow colors, centered text and lots of ALL CAP TEXT mixed in with regular text. I doubt the real target audience (administrators and purchasing agents) appreciates the design and layout. Well, I hope they don’t appreciate it.

Fortunately, in the HTML version there doesn’t seem to be any animated GIFs, but in the Flash version of the site there is at least one animation. The Flash version doesn’t really need to exist. The HTML version would be sufficient—except for the reasons cited above.

Interestingly, the above page was given a 95 by Yslow (but a 78 by Page Speed). The back end seems to be in better shape than what the public sees.

As a lark, I did a quick search for [juice company] and the first result I clicked was a sucker on the high-end of the spectrum: Odwalla. It’s an expensive Flash-based site that wastes your time.

For grins I clicked on Naked Juice and the site is infinitely better than either of the two mentioned

Who is Pennyjuice?

Submitter’s comments: Searching for a local service I came across this site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I suspect this is a large, well-respected company who doesn’t understand that their image is being hurt—especially by their images. Like yesterday’s sucker many of the images are resized in HTML or CSS. Because someone designed the page wider than 1200 pixels, you have to scroll horizontally to see the complete page. One of the partially cut out images is 581 x 388 pixels and it’s scaled down to 300 x 300 pixels.

The menu items have a white “aura” around them, which shows they were designed for an all-white background. You also don’t center text content.

Wet Water Equipment Technology

Submitter’s comments: This is a site of a local woman who deals in Feng shui decorating amongst a million other things that are all listed on the same site in no particular order.  I really like the “Clear (your) Clutter” advertisement on the right column of the page.  I wish it worked.

I thought Feng shui decorating was about proper placement of things.  It’s hard to find my Qi on this site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Qi whiz, I’m always losing my Qis.

The submenus on many/most/all the pages are impossible to read. Some pages are centered and some pages are flush left (Interior Design), we’ve got rainbow dividers (which, thank God, are not animated) and while I like color around me, there’s just a little too much color on the site.

If this is what websites should look like when they’re Feng Shuid, then we’re all Wang Chunged (tonight. [Sorry for the 80’s musical reference.]).

Feng Shui Interior Design