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

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

Submitter’s comments: This page is so horrible I had to share it with SOMEONE.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I thought the page hadn’t been changed since it was created in 2004; however, the header indicates it was last-modified on “Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:53:46 GMT.”

Yeah, it’s for kids, but it’s still poorly done. I especially love the “About the Author” and “About the Illustrator” sections which are just pictures with text used as graphics which you can’t read.

You need Java to hear the music. Java? What? I haven’t seen the Netscape 3.0 button in years. Wow.

George The Moose

Submitter’s comments: Here is a good one.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’ll give it credit for being readable. No artsy-fartsy #777 text. Nope. You have lots of text in lots of different colors and it’s all readable. I must be getting old (my daughter would say, “No, dad. You’re already very, very old) but it doesn’t really annoy me like so many other over-the-top websites. Probably because nothing is animated.

Yes, music does automatically play and the choice of music is surprising. It’s the theme from the movie “The Sting,” which I don’t think it’s the kind of message you want to send. A more logical musical choice would be Prince’s “1999.” Yeah. We’re gonna party like it’s 1999. In this case, we’re going to build a website like it’s 1999.

Parties by Debi