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

Submitter’s comments: This bunch were advertising on TV, and I looked them up to see if they were providing a genuine service. It seems they are, but I was intrigued by the Latin tagline on their home page:

Ut a nunc ornare velit ornare ullamcorper sed eu magna.

So I used Google search and it presented several unrelated sites, but they all seemed to have a similar layout — a WordPress theme, it seems. The text is placeholder text, but possibly with an actual meaning relating to the theme; my Latin is extremely rusty and I’m not certain either way. It’s fine that some of the pages appear to be works in progress, and are full of Lorem Ipsum.

But beyonddebt.com.au is advertising on TV. And they have meaningless, at least to them, text on their home page.

Doh!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I could be wrong, but I don’t think there are many Latin-speaking Australians. I also don’t think the phrase “Ut a nunc ornare velit…” translates to “Are you struggling with debt.” A more likely translation would be “Es vos nixor per debitum?”

When viewed under IE8, you can’t view the phone number in the upper-right corner of the home page. You can view it in Google Chrome. They need to use a service like BrowserCam to test their site.

My best guess is the site is “nearing completion,” but since they’re advertising on TV, they need to have the site fully functional. Serious mistake.

Beyond Debt

MAY BE NSFW

Submitter’s comments: This website is for Laren Stover’s book, “The Bombshell Manual of Style,” and what a bomb it is. There is no navigation to speak of, you only progress forward through an incredibly annoying Flash with low-res graphics, and god help you if you need to return to a previous section because you’re going to need to drag all those panties off the screen and “walk” the little dog again.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I took the site’s Bombshell Test and answered 9 questions correctly, which makes me a bombshell with va-va voom to spare.

The above graphic demonstrates the major flaw of this site. It’s created in Flash. Flash is as dead as Steve Jobs. The graphics are poorly constructed and the site does nothing to make me want to explore further. If the site were created using HTML5 Canvas, we’d have designers wetting themselves over its brilliance. In Flash it sucks. Timing is everything.

The Bombshell Manual of Style

It’s that time again. Actually, it’s way past time.

The year 2012 is shaping up to be one of the worst years for web design since…well, since last year. Maybe we should blame it on the Mayans. According to their calendar the world is supposed to end this December so maybe bad web design will end with it <grin>. I doubt it.

Worst Websites of 2012: January to March Contenders

I fixed the link below. Stupid freaking mistake. Worst Websites of 2012: April to August Contenders

Submitter’s comments: Suggested sucky website.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’ve never seen anything like the home page. Actually, it’s the strangest Splash Page I’ve ever seen. Scroll over the word “Techniche” and tell me you’ve seen this technique before today. The strangest part of this technique is that nothing is clickable. You have to click “Skip to the Main Website” to go to the content.

On the left side there’s a Mystery Meat Navigation menu and none of the symbols has, as far as I can tell, any relation to the topic. Oh. There’s more Mystery Meat at the top of the page.

The site is totally fouled up. By “totally fouled up” I mean…you know what I mean.

Techniche

Submitter’s comments: Right away from the pointless start page with music that takes ages to load, I knew I was being transported back in time…to maybe before 2004, when the trend was to unrelentingly do everything in Flash, for no good reason. (Maybe designers gave up trying to make sites work in a variety of different broken browsers and Flash was seen as a quick way out of browser hell… only to inflict us with another kind of hell.)

Enter the site and the first thing I see is a lot of badly formatted, nonsense text to read, which tells me nothing.

I Almost failed to spot the very dark navigation on the left that only appears when the mouse is over each one.

The annoying noisy headings that take ages to appear… weird navigation…
some pages have that horrible “make you read everything through a tiny letterbox with awkward scroll thingy” that was so popular back in the day.

This site needs to be put out of its misery.. Sadly I’m not a web designer, otherwise I’d quote them to redo it.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Nicely reviewed.

Flash for websites is as dead as Steve Jobs. To make a Flash website even “deader” than it is requires a Splash Page. This site has one. After that, I’m taken to a page I can’t read, with symbols I didn’t even notice without the help of the submitter’s comments and such a confusing mish-mash of I-don’t-know-what that I don’t have the slightest idea what the site is about except that it’s not about weddings. I don’t care about the site so I leave. After taking a cursory examination, I suggest you do the same.

The Wedding Collective