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

Submitter’s comments: Site looks nice. Plain, but nice. Kinda like an old-fashioned ice cream palace. Unfortunately that is all there is to the site, the home page. Also, all that text is actually images.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Not sure if it’s true Daily Sucker material. It might be nice to know what types of pastries and ice cream are available, but I’m the type of guy who would just go. On the other hand, Using graphics for text is definitely on Web Design Checklist 1: 165 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell.

Churn

Submitter’s comments: They need to update their website.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s a Flash-based website and there’s very little here that requires the use of Flash. Certainly not the Flash-Splash page. There is at least one video and it’s fine to use Flash for video. In fact, Adobe is only focusing Flash on gaming and premium video.

Now, more than ever, Flash isn’t the best solution for websites. Use it for what it’s meant to be used for—games and video.

Arctic Sunwest Charters

Submitter’s comments: It is meant to be a site about history but has all that unnecessary, jarring gumpf.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I had never run across the word “gumpf” before. Love it. “Random junk.” I think it’s a subset of Over-the-top Web Design. There are OTT websites that have a consistent theme and then there are Gumpf OTT—or GOTT websites—as in “Mein GOTT.”

There’s way too much crammed on one ugly page. I’m not sure they’ve licensed the likenesses of Clint Eastwood are Arnold Schwarzenegger and it’s just plan horrible looking, which is a shame because I really liked the Anglo-Saxon English class I took and to have these representatives screw it up is a bit sad.

Oh, the site is mildly NSFW (I think). Depends on how politically correct your company is and how much bathing suits offend. On the other hand, there might be worse pictures. Dunno because I have no reason to stay on the site.

Mercia Tourist Board

Submitter’s comments: Scunthorpe is a town in the north of England. The website is run by the media group which produces the weekly newspaper for the area. It had a major revamp a couple of years ago when they decided that what the town really needed was a long scrolling, box laden vomit fest of a site designed to make casual viewers wish for blindness.

“Features” include:

• a lag when scrolling caused by the interminable boxes
• links themed with a rainbow of good taste
• missing images (I didn’t see any but I didn’t try too hard <grin> – vf)
• random shop adverts and news stories strewn everywhere
• links which wander off onto other domain names e.g. try announcements
• links back which go to the wrong site e.g. try announcements, then Scunthorpe Telegraph Announcements, then try to get back, you will likely end up on thisisgrimsby instead.
• less than intelligent positioning of “useful links” and “most popular” stories.

I mean, I could go on…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ah…Scunthorpe. What a problem you are. The site uses a strange variant of Mystery Meat Navigation that I’ll call color-coded MMN. Most of the little sections on the home page have colored bars on the left side. These match up to the colors at the top and bottom of the page that’s called “Today in Scunthorpe.” Who is going to remember this system? Why would anyone in their right mind want to remember it?

One of the perils of this silly system is you put the wrong color code on an item.

The home page takes forever to load—even in England! The load time is 11.742 seconds in London (the first byte is 0.251). Ironically, it loaded faster from Washington, D.C. 8.846 seconds (but the first byte took longer at 0.383).

This is Scunthorpe

Submitter’s comments: So here’s an excellent example of a horrid website. My boyfriend took one look at it (and its autoplay music was going) and he asked, “…is this for a night club?” Nope. It’s a photographer/fashion site.

And you can barely tell what kind of site it is until you get to the portfolio section, which doesn’t even have a means of navigating once you have selected portraits/fashion/glamor or whatever the options are. The portraits one was a nightmare. I found myself spinning my cursor in circles just to try and get a quick glimpse of each picture. Why do people think that sites like this get them business!? You need an easy to navigate your site so that your business is accessible to everyone. What were they thinking, webpagesthatsuck.com!? WHAT WERE THEY THINKIIIING!?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I initially thought it was a website for a gay dance club in downtown Seattle (it’s an interesting story—five guys and girls went out dancing and we had a great time). When I looked at the URL—SugarYourSpice—I thought it might be a site for an adult novelty store (like Lovers in Puyallup—it’s an interesting story…). Nope. They provide hair and makeup for photo shoots.

I don’t know their clientele, but I don’t think their current website would be as effective as something simple and straightforward. Actually, I’m going to propose they keep their Flashy silly site and create a regular site and give folks the option of choosing which one they want. This is the rare type of site that can benefit by having a normal, HTML-based site and a showy Flash site.

Sugar & Spice is NSFW (slightly)