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

Submitter’s comments: I learned about the site below in a local council publication as a ‘portal’ to what’s happening in Cardiff. So, I went to visit it.

This site is a complete turn-off right at the home page. It is so poor, starting with Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN), that I didn’t even bother delving any deeper.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’m surprised by the MMN. Normally, when you click one of the mystery links, you’re taken to a complex page—often Flash-based. Nope. You’re taken to a strictly text-based page. Huh? Why couldn’t Cardiff Contemporary use a simple menu for navigation? Of images that were labeled?

Oh, a really serious mistake that’s uncalled for has to do with clicking the logo on the subpages. It takes back to the Mystery Meat home page—where you have to mouse over the “X’s” once again.

Cardiff Contemporary

Submitter’s comments: A “mascot” worse than Clippy; hamsters; Mystery Meat Navigation; Flash; and happy, bright, obnoxious colors.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If there’s one thing that scares the bejesus out of me, it’s the use of “hamsters” and “mystery meat” in the same sentence.

The worst of the two designs is the one on the left. It’s pretty frightening. Take a look and you’ll agree.

Habitrail

Submitter’s comments: As far as bad taste goes, my candidate is on par with The Afterlife, though at least it won’t trigger epilepsy attacks.

Better close other tabs before opening this web page in Firefox (under 64-bit Windows 7); it brings down the browser despite the available 16 GB of RAM.

This is a 2.6 MB heavy HTML page containing nearly 4,000 image links in one huge table.

Each image is shown as a 200 x 200 thumbnail, but the referenced pictures are full-size images averaging 100 Kb. That means that the renderer has to handle no less than 400 MB of data to display the page.

So you can’t blame Mozilla for the crashing of Firefox. Firefox faithfully tries to load all the resources on the page and the renderer simply can’t handle the 400 MB. You can start loading the page though, but make sure to abort it after a couple of seconds.

Since most pictures are not square, the scaling to a square distorts them, with an extreme example at the bottom left of the screen. This is a 454 x 12,432 pixel JPEG image, weighing in 2.2 MB. Horizontally it’s scaled by a factor of 2, vertically by a factor of 60.

Internet Explorer doesn’t crash because it quickly stops downloading images. If you try to save the complete web page, IE downloads the images one after another without rendering them, yet it also gives up after 2 hours(!) of downloading, and removes the 2,700 images it got so far (260 MB).

I estimate the whole page to be around 500,000 pixels high, so it’s no surprise the screen capture program SnagIt also “failed scrolling capture”.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: There’s nothing funny about this website. In fact, there are a lot of “humor” websites who use the same horrible web design techniques.

I ran the page through WebPageTest and the page crashed the test. It stopped at 10Mb and 25,000 DOM elements. The Page Speed Optimization Test scored a marvelously low 19 out of 100. The page is a big, fat POS, which is what an old girlfriend once called me. Hmm.

Sarcasmistan NSFW

Vincent Flanders’ comments: On average, I get bronchitis once a year. This year I got it going out trick or treating with my grandson. As long as I don’t die, it was worth it (I was hospitalized with bronchitis a couple of years ago). If I die, well…that sucks.

I’m going to provide several Daily Sucker candidates without screen shots or my commentary. The folks who submit sites are cool and know what they’re talking about.

1. Uncle Bill’s Bike Shop

I have a contender for you, this site sheared two of my five senses, left me permanently cross-eyed, made my ears bleed and dulled my mental capacity to the point that I have forgotten what this email is about.

Uncle Bill’s Bike Shop

2. Hobby Insider

Submitter’s comments: It’s the 1990’s, man.

Hobby Insider

3. Showeb

Submitter’s comments: Ran across this when looking for puppets.

Showeb

4. The Anderson

Submitter’s comments: Found this hopeless website. Tried to look for opening times. Good luck!

The Anderson

Submitter’s comments: Did you ever think that genocide against a people could result in such horrors (of websites)?

Ignoring the lunatic claim that there is a genocide going on against an ethnic group in England, this site has some lovely bizarre features. Enjoy.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The major sin of the site is its 1995 boring. For an Over-the-top Website, it looks pretty good.

TYR – GWYR – GWERYN Genocide