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

Submitter’s comments: You don’t hear from me often, but when you do you can bet it’s because I’ve found something worthy of mention. To be honest, I find lots of sucky sites on the web, but I only send you the ones that truly, inarguably and inexcusably suck.

My nomination for the Daily Sucker is PenGun.com. It is abusive to the mind on so many levels. Everything from the color scheme to the background to the HR tag use just makes me cringe. Still, even with all of that I might have let it go, were it not for the Mystery Meat Navigation. That is where I draw the line.

The navigation on PenGun.com is flash-based, which is bad enough, but on top of that you can barely tell it is navigation because… there are no words in the default view, and all of the graphic links look exactly the same. You don’t get the privilege of seeing where you’re headed until you hover the mouse over each link. And, the descriptions promptly hide themselves after your mouse leaves the area. For further proof that we’re dealing with a Mystery Meat Navigation issue, you’ll find written instructions right below the navigation area telling you how to use it.

And just to add insult to injury, there is a sound when you hover over the navigation.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: ou need a monitor with 1600×1200 pixels before you can see the menu at the bottom. Why it’s there I just don’t understand.

Yes, it says the page is a personal page, but a personal page is a page about you and your life. Heck, even Vincent Flanders.com isn’t personal.

Stinger Penguns

Submitter’s comments: I just saw a local TV restaurant review on this place and thought I’d check it out.  Interesting splash page, except that seems to be the whole site. Talk about Mystery Meat Navigation!

I checked out the link that says “Amazing,” and several of the patron comments about their restaurant are negative. I thought at first maybe they were toning down the background for the critic’s quote page, but they didn’t.  I guess I’m just not hip enough for this website.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is a rare example of lose-lose-lose. We have Mystery Meat Navigation that isn’t suitable to view at work and, if you do view it, might cause epileptic seizures. What are these people thinking? They’re obviously not thinking about mobile users because I can’t get past the first screen on my iPhone, which is PFS (Pretty Stupid) for a restaurant. Massive, massive FAIL.

Justine’s Restaurant – NSFW and possibly seizure inducing!

Submitter’s comments: I was researching website design for a project I am doing and stumbled across this website. I’m not sure where to look because my gaze keeps going from one paragraph to another trying to figure out where to look as they all seem to compete for attention.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s your stereotypic crappy-looking website. A blind man would be offended by the color scheme. Check out the subpages, especially the “Small But Important Details” page.

I’ve often asked myself, “Why can’t we see that our web pages suck?” I’ve never figured out the answer to this question. The closest I’ve come is an article “Why can we predict other people’s behavior more accurately than our own?” To paraphrase, when we view other people’s behavior we consider the context. With our own behavior, we don’t.

In the world of web design, we can see other people’s mistakes, but not our own, because we’re too close and too familiar with our own pages. We can use our critical eye on another site, but our critical eye goes blind on our site.

Valley Isle Aquatics

After I typed the link, Satori hit me. The existence of bad web design can be explained by the following:

Submitter’s comments: No mystery here. Ouch. Very 1990’s.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It is very 1990’s. I’m old-fashioned. I like my background images to tile without noticeable seams. I like for my pages to have a consistent look, although since the site uses frames I know I haven’t left the site when I click on a link in the left frame. When I click on the “Klamath Chamber” link, I’m taken to a page where one of the top links is “Sample Page” and that’s exactly what it is.

Trees of Mystery

Submitter’s comments: I used Google to search for “best learn spanish sites” and the top result was this page.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Somebody in the SEO community needs to figure out why this website ranks so high. It violates every positive web design concept we have. The site’s success also makes me believe the Web Standards gods are full of it. Yes, there’s content—plenty of it—but it’s mostly on the home page. A very long home page that weighs in at approximately 6Mb. A home page that has a Page Speed score of 50 and 2,673 errors.

All I should have to say to prove it sucks are two simple words—”Comic Sans.” There’s even an error I don’t recall seeing before. There are six graphics titled “Links” but none of them are actually links.

I even thought that the search query was a little funky. I tried [best websites to learn spanish] and it came up #2. Seriously, there’s something going on here that might be very important to the SEO community.

Best Spanish Websites