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

Submitters’ comments: Visit the web design past with this Italian “medical” site, which also uses FrontPage. I strongly suspect some (pejorative term deleted), if not OTT (over-the-top). On site pages are often very long (20 or more screens’ worth). The top menu seems to take you to either more pages on the site or other sites, but not in any uniform way. Have at it.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s in Italian, but since I use Google Chrome as my browser I had Google Translate’s function translate into English because like most Americans, I only know one language. It’s definitely an Over-The-Top website and not just because it’s talks about alternative medicine. It’s 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 antipsychotics in a while school of web design.” Maybe it’s just a terminally fatal case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

Oh, before you go to the site, check out the screen below:

The Web of Trust plugin does NOT like the site at all. It told me that it has an unsatisfactory score for Trustworthiness (2/5 score) and Child Safety (2/5 score). Caveat emptor. I think we can consider it a design flaw <grin>.

As expected with this type of site we have text problems—but fewer than is “normal” for an OTT website. We have both flush-left and centered text on the page and some links are in bold and others aren’t. He uses TABLEs with borders.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights, whose goal is to “Make your web pages fast on all devices,” doesn’t think much about their home page. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test thinks even less with the page because it flunks their test.

If you are the purveyor of an alternative medicine site and want to look like you know what you’re doing, go to The Food Babe’s site. For those of you who are unaware of her, she’s the object of ridicule in the scientific, medical and nutritional communities who practice conventional medicine. No comments about whether she is or is not practicing woo. Of course, going to her site brings up a Web of Trust popup window. She’s viewed slightly more positive than Mednet.org, scoring 3/5 on both Trustworthiness and Child Safety. I view her more positively because her site gives the appearance of competence.

Mednat.org

Submitters’ comments: I was trying to look at the menu for a frozen yogurt shop on my phone and was disappointed to find this.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Flash has sucked forever. Now, even Adobe wants nothing to do with Flash—at least its name. The article shows that Adobe is even confused about what’s happening. They change the name to Adobe Animate like that’s going to make everything better. Well, maybe it will work. They’re still keeping Flash for the desktop, but everyone knows the desktop is not where it’s at in 2016 (and earlier). I thought everybody knew the web is all about mobile and as you see above, Flash doesn’t run on a mobile device. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t boot up my desktop and wait until everything loaded to try to find a yogurt shop. I’d use my phone. I suspect most people look for a yogurt shop when they’re out and about, so the phone is the tool to use.

The Flash-based home page has some issues. The two menu tabs (“Newsfeed” and “Latest Blogs”) are basically unreadable because of the lack of contrast. The “Latest Blogs” page is not Flash-based, but it uses centered text erratically, text comes in various sizes and colors and the page is too long. The worst part is that when you leave the “Latest Blogs page and go back to the home page, the music and sound start up again—even when you’ve turned them off on the home page. Tacky.

Mojo Yogurt

Submitters’ comments: Checking out some places in Hawaii to stay and found this site worthy of submission for a 2016 start. The varied sized photos, the progressively smaller font changes as you scroll down some pages. I love it.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The multi-colored text is pretty annoying as it’s different sizes. It took a while to figure out the navigation scheme—and “scheme” is a good word for it. You’re making me think about navigation and website visitors don’t want to think and nobody puts their navigation in the middle of the page. I suspect it’s a great spot to vacation, but why would anyone who’s been to their website want to book a stay? Of course, it’s January here in the US and everyone is in or wishes they were in Hawaii so this place is booked solid in January. Maybe if you’re selling the crack cocaine version of a vacation spot like they are, your website can suck.

Let us not forget the trailing cursor with its blatant advertising. I love advertising, but it should be tasteful.

Paradise With a View

Submitters’ comments: This is an actual company. I couldn’t believe it either. They actually have great service though the Atari 2600 Purists website.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, the good news is you can easily read both sites—lack of contrast and small text are pet peeves of all talented web designers and myself—but you won’t find those problems here. What you find is centered text, which is harder to read than flush-left text (search Google for [is centered text bad] or something similar). There are different colors used for links, underlined text is used on regular text instead of solely for links, text is different size, etc. The home page for Best Electronics is also too long.

The Atari 2600 Purists website has a few problems of its own. It requires Java, which any sane person has removed from their system. When you click “Forums” you’ll discover there’s no normal way to close the window except by clicking another link.

Best Electronics and Atari 2600 Purists website

Vincent Flanders’ comments: For some reason, some Facebook friends post items from WorldTruth.TV and I’m always confused. Is this site just another The Onion? In the good old days, you could tell if this was a crazy, over-the-top website spewing its own brand of silliness. Not so easy to tell today.

This site makes one huge silly mistake. Text is centered in articles. Seriously. There have been billions of research studies showing that centered text is the hardest way to read text. Why are they centering the text? Show me a Fortune 200,000 company who uses justified text. Why not? Because people won’t take you seriously.

This is an easy mistake to correct. I hope they do. Then I’ll have to try to figure out what kind of a website I’m looking at.

WorldTruth.TV