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

Submitter’s comments: Bad design, good prices

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s your stereotypic crappy-looking gun website. It mostly consists of one long page and looks like it was created back in late 1995.

I went to Google and typed in [guns NC] and didn’t find today’s sucker listed. What I did find was the Hyatt Gun Shop, which was the #1 search result. It won’t win any Webbys for design, but it won’t get listed on this site (unless there’s something horrible I didn’t see during my cursory visit). Hyatt’s look should be inspirational to Classic Firearms.

Classic Firearms

Here’s a link to one of my YouTube videos about another gun site.

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

NVEnergize – An Example of Bad Web Design for April 15, 2012

Submitter’s comments: AHHHHHH!

What rule doesn’t this website break? Constant scrolling whilst you move your mouse, plus the loading page just looks like the whole website (because who’s going to think that a barometer {I think it is} going upward SLOOOOOOOOWLY is a loading page?)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Initially, I wasn’t sure if this qualified. Then I started scrolling and ran into a bunch of Mystery Meat Navigation. The worst culprit is “Renewable Generation.” You have to mouse over the first solar panel to bring up the tooltip. You would think that it would be enough to mouse over any other part of the building. Nope. That seems like an incredible oversight and I can’t believe someone at NVEnergy didn’t notice. When you mouse over the house to the right, there’s no link. You have to go up to the top of the hill for “Traditional Generation.”

Finally, why are they using the secure https protocol?

NVEnergize

Vincent Flanders’ comments: My daughter said, “One of my friends posted on Facebook, ‘Two gay men just brought VD into my house.'” Naturally, my interest was piqued. The “VD” turned out to be “Voodoo Doughnuts” instead of something more salacious. Of course, I went to the VD website and immediately decided they were using Mystery Meat Navigation because I didn’t see a normal menu. Wrong. I use a portrait monitor and, as you can see from this screen capture, the menu is at the bottom of a very long page. The page isn’t so long on a monitor in landscape mode, but the menu is not on the first screen. Like every normal user, I don’t want to figure out where the navigation is located. I just want to find it now.

VD is using a technique I haven’t seen in a long time—they’re disabling the right mouse click. I realize their images should be protected, but they are using watermarks. Anybody who really wants the images knows how to get them, so I’m not sure why they’re disabling the right click.

As someone who knows his way around doughnuts, their menu looks exciting and I’m sure their doughnuts are just as great as their names (Cock-N-Balls is my favorite name for a doughnut). All VD really haa to do is make it easier to enter the site. I can overlook the rest of the design because this is the type of business that can have a fun website. Dunkin’ Donuts can’t and doesn’t.

Voodoo Donuts