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

These sites run the gamut from just a few tragic mistakes to the worst kind of Over-The-Top websites you see featured here in The Daily Sucker.

My personal favorites are the WTF?—What The Heck?—sites that make you shake your head and ask the question, “Did anybody look at this site before it went live?” The answer to that question is usually, “Doesn’t look like it.”

You need to go through the whole list because today’s rankings aren’t permanent. For example, I’m very fond of #17—Jes MaHarry—and I’m sure it will rank higher when the final list comes out later this year.

Worst Websites of 2013: The Contenders from January through June

Submitter’s comments: This horrific theater site makes my eyes bleed!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Actually, it could have been even worse. There are no animated images. I know, after looking at the screenshot, it’s hard to believe. Most of the page consists of images. The page is only about 9% text and the rest is code. Ooops.

Goetz Theatre Show Times page

Submitter’s comments: I’m a long time reader, but this is the first website I really came across that prompted me to submit it.

I need to try and register a fictitious name for my business which I’m putting together, and this is the site I need to traverse to do it.

The color scheme is a full-on frontal assault to the retinas and the navigation scheme seems illogical at best. Enjoy.>

Vincent Flanders’ comments:

I don’t know what menu item I clicked on the home page, but The Wisconsin Register of Deeds listed by County page’s color scheme is taken from the home page and I wish they had taken the color scheme from somewhere else.

Wisconsin Register of Deeds Association

Submitter’s comments: I’m just back from a trip to San Francisco, which is Coolness Central. But as we both know, suckiness is too strong a force to stop, even there!

We had heard about a particular restaurant and went online to find out hours and such. My wife said, “Come look at this, something’s very wrong!” So I looked at the site and I was thrilled to watch 30 zillion images slowly loading per page. Hilarious!

I soon realized that we had the epitome of a right-brain website with no left-brain function whatsoever! It is pretty looking, which fits this type of site. It’s all HTML tables, duh, of course! As far as I can tell, it’s made with Photoshop slices, which Photoshop then cuts up the main image and barfs out HTML that includes every separate layer of Photoshop.

A mystery remains, because you could just use maybe 1 or 2 giant images per page – what they’re doing is totally the hard way. My thought is that maybe the client called and said, “Whaaaa! My precious site is loading too slow!!!” So the designer somehow broke it up into a million pieces, and now you have an extremely crude “parallel loading scheme”.

Final bonus: on the menu page, zero SEO because it’s all images! Hooray! It’s simply unbelievable, and I hope you “enjoy” it as much as I did!

P.S. We did have lunch there and the food was great! :-)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It doesn’t surprise me that the quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the quality of the website. That’s very common with restaurant sites.

Initially, I thought I was looking at a Splash page with no links. I couldn’t find any. I went and ran an errand and when I came back I accidentally clicked what turned out to be the link to what was the “home” page. The link was the word “Enter” but its color blended in with the background and I didn’t see it.

From a cursory examination, it looks like every page is comprised of nothing but images. Not helpful for SEO. The text on the menus was also very small and hard to read and needed leading between the menu items.

Another very suckily designed website.

Chilango Restaurants

Submitter’s comments: Sucky.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yeah, it’s pretty bad. My monitor has a screen that’s 1200 pixels wide—and the text is still cut off. Splash pages, for the most part, are dead; however, this site thinks we all wet our pants just to see what’s basically a logo. A big, fat logo and nothing else. Waste.

Click anywhere on the “home” page and you’ll be taken to the “Our History” page. This site fails to realize people don’t like to read that much text. (Yes, it’s a problem here at WPTS, but at least I’m providing instructions.) The text on the left is also too close to the edge of the screen. A little CSS padding wouldn’t hurt.

Here’s the fun part. Once you’re on a subpage (like “Our History”) and click the Home button, you’re taken to the all-logo “Home” page where’s there’s no navigation except to click and go to the Our History page. This is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Chermac Energy Corporation