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

Submitter’s comments: Their website truly sucks. It has been up for over a year with half-deployed content, poorly implemented Flash, background sound, oddly implemented photo slide shows, conflicting contact info, etc.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: If there’s anything worse than Flash, it’s Flash that doesn’t load (IE 9 and Chrome) for a long, long time and, even then, the center content doesn’t load until you click the menu. If you click “Products,” you get the message “page 3.” I love the fax number and email address on the bottom-right of the front page (xxx-xxx-xxxxx). Didn’t anyone notice the problems?

Balance (isn’t)

Submitter’s comments: Since you are or were Catholic I thought you might “like” this site. It’s seriously sucky!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This church is located in Bellevue, Washington and I used to live in the slums of Bellevue. (Seattle area folks will get the joke. The estimated median house or condo value in 2009: $544,900. But not in the slums of Bellevue <sigh>.)

The home page is frame-based, which displays the page “correctly” only if you have a large monitor. If your monitor is smaller, you’ll see both sets of frames. The text is way too small and hard to read unless you’re close to the monitor. Sum/many of the subpages have completely different looks like the Confirmation and the Music Ministry pages. Some of the pictures are incorrectly scaled. There’s one 1.4Mb picture that’s 1,500px × 2,10px (scaled to 214px × 299px). Another is 1,024px × 683px (scaled to 700px × 466px). Some of the links open PDFs, but the links don’t identify them as PDFs.

As to the submitter’s comments: yes, I’m a pre-Vatican II, lapsed Catholic. The Latin at the beginning is a remnant from my days at a Jesuit high school. We had to put A.M.D.G. at the top of all our work. It means “For the Greater Glory of God.” That holy thought comes from the same folks who helped bring us the Spanish Inquisition.

St. Louise Catholic Church

Thanks to Reddit for letting me know that Havenworks, one of the cornerstones of horrible, over-the-top web design and The Worst Website of 2008 is dead. Fortunately, Archive.org still has a “working” copy.

Submitter’s comments: Seizure, anyone?

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I have no idea what they do and I don’t care. I’m not sensitive to seizures, but this horrible flashing, strobing images made me feel like I was going to have one. WTF are these people thinking? Wait. They’re not thinking.

SEIZURE ALERT! – TechSpec NDT

Submitter’s comments: First, we have what is just overall weird design, where the Man from Mars
couldn’t figure out what the site is unless he already knew an awful lot about the site. Then we have Mystery Meat Navigation: a rectangle (not obviously a link) labeled Imprint Technologies is actually the contact link. Finally, all the content is presented in frames which, at least on my browser, fill up about 1/3 of the screen.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: On my portrait monitor, they don’t fill up that much space and the contact link is two-thirds down the page. The submitter is right. This is a very weird design. Usually, when people use frames they try to show all the content and try not to make their visitors scroll. On this site, they hide (unnecessarily) as much content as they can. What the Heck? We’ve got the repeating background, the strange colors and lack of contrast. Wow. Bizarre.

Imprint Technologies