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

Submitter’s comments: A new and revolting form of Mystery Meat Navigation. Information that could have been presented all together in half a screen as a static bullet items list, is, for no reason but bling, spread out in a faux Windows Metro layout. Each tiny morsel of information is hidden until you flip it around, and it instantly flips back to make sure you need to remember it if you decide to look at another.

Very smooth animation, though (at least on my system). I can’t remember a single fact from that screen.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I agree with everything you say and I’ll add that since the Mystery Meat was labeled – does that make it un-Mystery Meat? – I’ll partially excuse it. Oh, it’s been 30 seconds and I, too, can’t remember a single fact from that screen

HelloWallet – Our Story

Submitter’s comments: Please note my nomination. I never saw such a terrible page.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Part of me is happy that you’ve never seen such a terrible page; however, the other part of me is sad because you haven’t been perusing my site.

The screenshot above seems to show a relatively benign looking website—one that WPTS rarely shows. You have to go to the page in question and take a look. What catches your eyes first is all the animations. These jerky GIFs and movies are horribly distracting and visitors will have difficulty on focusing on what’s most important on the page. By the way, what is most important on the page?

All it takes to make the page harmless is stop the motion.

Ramstein Yard Sales

Submitter’s comments: My eyes are still burning from the site AND content … let’s teach police increased brutality!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This website definitely constitute bad web design brutality. Cop and cop-related websites have always been a staple here at WPTS. Heck, back in 2008 cop sites were featured in Worst Old School Web Sites of 2008: Cops and Chiropractors. If you were a cop, would you want to use this site’s services? It doesn’t look professional and cops like to be professional (at least I hope so).

The home page is 1.4Mb, which is problematic. The TITLE tag is “Home Page” and everybody but the site owner knows search engines put a lot of weight on the contents of the TITLE tag. The registration form for the 2014 Arrestling Officer Safety Conference is a PDF you have to fill out and mail in unless you pay by credit card. Oh, credit card payment is done over the phone. Yeah, they’re up-to-date on ecommerce.

The home page has this code: @import url(file:///C|/Program Files/Macromedia/Contribute 2 for Affinity/ My first WTF? is why are you using Macromedia Contribute 2? It’s more dead than Stevie Ray Vaughn (yesterday was the 24th anniversary of his death). If it exists, it’s up to Release 6.5. My second WTF? is the home page is using @import. HTML performance experts say it’s best not to use it. Obviously, the page isn’t really using it because web visitors can’t access the designer’s Drive C.

This website is a classic example of Mistake #6 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.“ I call this type of design the “I haven’t taken my anti-psychotics in a while school of web design.”

Gulla’s Arrestling

Submitter’s comments: I would like to submit a local university. For a technology and design school, it’s terrible.

If you open it up with most IE browsers you can barely navigate it. Once in the website you’re brought to another website that, on occasion, doesn’t look like the one you started with. These are remnants of our old site they have yet to change. Just click on Admissions > How to Apply from the main site for an example.

Not only is the home page terrible to navigate (floaty degrees above the head are hard to see), but once inside you can barely find the information or forms you need. Then there are multiple pages with outdated information or just different information from other pages.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The best thing I can say about the website is it doesn’t use Flash, but that’s like saying “Vincent, for a fat boy you don’t sweat much.” I agree, of course, with our submitter it’s pretty horrendous. But I want to talk about what’s under hood—a festering pile of crap that’s screwing up the visitor’s experience. When I ran the Web Design Degree page through WebPageTest.org, I got the waterfall from hell. It took almost 4 seconds for the page to start loading. (If the page isn’t cached, here’s a screenshot) Oh, it’s also 21mb!!!! The home page, I believe, is ~30Mb. That’s right 30Mb. It gets better. I ran the Web Design Degree through Google’s PageSpeed Insights program and the page scored 7/100 on mobile and 12/100 on desktop.

BTW, I hate the name. “Advancing” Technology? WTF? You don’t need “Advancing” because it’s implied. What it implies is there must be a University of Retreating Technology and that’s why there’s a need for a University of Advancing Technology—or UAT, as in “Where U AT?” (Forgive me.)

It’s a pretty messed up site. Reminds me of my site except they have squandered a lot of design talent.

University of Advancing Technology

Submitter’s comments: TW Steel make fancy watches We have pointless Flash intros, a strange “See the world of Watches/See the world of TW steel” round link thing that follows the cursor around, and in the see the world of TW steel bit -some showy hidey Mystery Meat Navigation madness.

I didn’t like it. Maybe you won’t either.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I don’t like it either, which is sad because I really like watches. KidsToday (and many AdultsToday) don’t realize many watches were extremely expensive (except watches like Timex). When I graduated from high school last century my parents bought me “a decent watch” for $150. There were no digital watches. You had to wind them to keep them going. In today’s dollars, the watch would cost $1,100. No wonder my old many lectured me about not losing the watch.

Ironically, the mobile version of TW Steel’s website looks and works a lot better than the Flash-based desktop version.

The Store Locater is a total joke. For “Country” I put USA and for “City” I put Vancouver. I was given a big map and after looking at it I couldn’t tell if there was a store in the area. I don’t think there is one, but why doesn’t it tell me that instead of giving me a map and having me try to see if there’s a store in the area. This massively, massively sucks.

TW Steel