February 3rd, 2012 9:09 am by Vincent Flanders
An excellent article that partially explains (to me) why people who have sucky websites don’t understand their websites suck.
The key phrase is:
People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.
If any of you folks out there are looking for a good research project, I think examining people who have sucky websites but think they don’t suck, would be pretty darn interesting.
How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance
Posted in Not a Daily Sucker, Web Design, You Should Read |
February 2nd, 2012 11:11 pm by Vincent Flanders
Submitter’s comments: This site is a rainbow-licious flavor of suckiness. Yikes! And thanks for your service to the Internet :-)
Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is an internal page for a company that makes “100% blended fruit juice concentrate that is specifically designed for childcare centers, preschools, Head Starts, etc.” Since many of those in their target audience are too young to read, I don’t understand the need for rainbow colors, centered text and lots of ALL CAP TEXT mixed in with regular text. I doubt the real target audience (administrators and purchasing agents) appreciates the design and layout. Well, I hope they don’t appreciate it.
Fortunately, in the HTML version there doesn’t seem to be any animated GIFs, but in the Flash version of the site there is at least one animation. The Flash version doesn’t really need to exist. The HTML version would be sufficient—except for the reasons cited above.
Interestingly, the above page was given a 95 by Yslow (but a 78 by Page Speed). The back end seems to be in better shape than what the public sees.
As a lark, I did a quick search for [juice company] and the first result I clicked was a sucker on the high-end of the spectrum: Odwalla. It’s an expensive Flash-based site that wastes your time.
For grins I clicked on Naked Juice and the site is infinitely better than either of the two mentioned
Who is Pennyjuice?
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |
January 31st, 2012 9:09 pm by Vincent Flanders
Submitter’s comments: Searching for a local service I came across this site.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: I suspect this is a large, well-respected company who doesn’t understand that their image is being hurt—especially by their images. Like yesterday’s sucker many of the images are resized in HTML or CSS. Because someone designed the page wider than 1200 pixels, you have to scroll horizontally to see the complete page. One of the partially cut out images is 581 x 388 pixels and it’s scaled down to 300 x 300 pixels.
The menu items have a white “aura” around them, which shows they were designed for an all-white background. You also don’t center text content.
Wet Water Equipment Technology
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |
January 30th, 2012 9:09 pm by Vincent Flanders
Submitter’s comments: This is a site of a local woman who deals in Feng shui decorating amongst a million other things that are all listed on the same site in no particular order. I really like the “Clear (your) Clutter” advertisement on the right column of the page. I wish it worked.
I thought Feng shui decorating was about proper placement of things. It’s hard to find my Qi on this site.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: Qi whiz, I’m always losing my Qis.
The submenus on many/most/all the pages are impossible to read. Some pages are centered and some pages are flush left (Interior Design), we’ve got rainbow dividers (which, thank God, are not animated) and while I like color around me, there’s just a little too much color on the site.
If this is what websites should look like when they’re Feng Shuid, then we’re all Wang Chunged (tonight. [Sorry for the 80’s musical reference.]).
Feng Shui Interior Design
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |
January 29th, 2012 9:09 pm by Vincent Flanders
Submitter’s comments: The website is stuck in the 1990s and it’s terrible to navigate.
Vincent Flanders’ comments: They also have links that are unmarked PDFs—lots of them. I viewed the source and counted 103 unmarked PDF links!
The home page has a Google Page Speed score of 14—one of the lowest I’ve seen. It’s major error is it resizes images in HTML or CSS. There are 32 of them and if they were properly scaled, they could save 2.5Mb in bandwidth each time the page loads. The site doesn’t enable caching or compression.
We have too much material on the home page (of course we do), the usual text problems (multiple colors, sizes, etc.). If scientists conducted experiments the way they design websites, all the scientists would have been blown up.
Ohio Academy of Science
Posted in Daily Sucker, Usability, Web Design, Worst Web Sites |
Worst Websites
