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

Submitter’s comments: While I was researching training providers in the north-east of Scotland, I was recommended to check out a company called ID Inspire.  A quick Google search brought up the above website. After clicking the link on Google and it trying to open an application(?!), I decided to enter the URL manually.

I still have no idea if this is the company I am looking for, or what on earth this company actually does.  All I can say is ‘Mystery Meat Lorem Ipsum’…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s back to school season here and in most parts of the world. Web design classes are in full swing and it’s the time when a young designer’s fancy turns to “How can I create a website that really, really sucks?” It doesn’t bother me that there isn’t an content other than Lorem Ipsum. What bothers me is the Mystery Meat Navigation. Why do you think your visitors want to guess how to get to your products / services / whatever you’re selling because I can’t tell.

The good news is there’s “still time to change the road you’re on.”

id-inspire

Submitter’s comments: A new and revolting form of Mystery Meat Navigation. Information that could have been presented all together in half a screen as a static bullet items list, is, for no reason but bling, spread out in a faux Windows Metro layout. Each tiny morsel of information is hidden until you flip it around, and it instantly flips back to make sure you need to remember it if you decide to look at another.

Very smooth animation, though (at least on my system). I can’t remember a single fact from that screen.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I agree with everything you say and I’ll add that since the Mystery Meat was labeled – does that make it un-Mystery Meat? – I’ll partially excuse it. Oh, it’s been 30 seconds and I, too, can’t remember a single fact from that screen

HelloWallet – Our Story

Submitter’s comments: Please note my nomination. I never saw such a terrible page.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Part of me is happy that you’ve never seen such a terrible page; however, the other part of me is sad because you haven’t been perusing my site.

The screenshot above seems to show a relatively benign looking website—one that WPTS rarely shows. You have to go to the page in question and take a look. What catches your eyes first is all the animations. These jerky GIFs and movies are horribly distracting and visitors will have difficulty on focusing on what’s most important on the page. By the way, what is most important on the page?

All it takes to make the page harmless is stop the motion.

Ramstein Yard Sales

Submitter’s comments: My eyes are still burning from the site AND content … let’s teach police increased brutality!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This website definitely constitute bad web design brutality. Cop and cop-related websites have always been a staple here at WPTS. Heck, back in 2008 cop sites were featured in Worst Old School Web Sites of 2008: Cops and Chiropractors. If you were a cop, would you want to use this site’s services? It doesn’t look professional and cops like to be professional (at least I hope so).

The home page is 1.4Mb, which is problematic. The TITLE tag is “Home Page” and everybody but the site owner knows search engines put a lot of weight on the contents of the TITLE tag. The registration form for the 2014 Arrestling Officer Safety Conference is a PDF you have to fill out and mail in unless you pay by credit card. Oh, credit card payment is done over the phone. Yeah, they’re up-to-date on ecommerce.

The home page has this code: @import url(file:///C|/Program Files/Macromedia/Contribute 2 for Affinity/ My first WTF? is why are you using Macromedia Contribute 2? It’s more dead than Stevie Ray Vaughn (yesterday was the 24th anniversary of his death). If it exists, it’s up to Release 6.5. My second WTF? is the home page is using @import. HTML performance experts say it’s best not to use it. Obviously, the page isn’t really using it because web visitors can’t access the designer’s Drive C.

This website is a classic example of Mistake #6 from Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 — “Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.“ I call this type of design the “I haven’t taken my anti-psychotics in a while school of web design.”

Gulla’s Arrestling

Submitter’s comments: I would like to submit a local university. For a technology and design school, it’s terrible.

If you open it up with most IE browsers you can barely navigate it. Once in the website you’re brought to another website that, on occasion, doesn’t look like the one you started with. These are remnants of our old site they have yet to change. Just click on Admissions > How to Apply from the main site for an example.

Not only is the home page terrible to navigate (floaty degrees above the head are hard to see), but once inside you can barely find the information or forms you need. Then there are multiple pages with outdated information or just different information from other pages.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The best thing I can say about the website is it doesn’t use Flash, but that’s like saying “Vincent, for a fat boy you don’t sweat much.” I agree, of course, with our submitter it’s pretty horrendous. But I want to talk about what’s under hood—a festering pile of crap that’s screwing up the visitor’s experience. When I ran the Web Design Degree page through WebPageTest.org, I got the waterfall from hell. It took almost 4 seconds for the page to start loading. (If the page isn’t cached, here’s a screenshot) Oh, it’s also 21mb!!!! The home page, I believe, is ~30Mb. That’s right 30Mb. It gets better. I ran the Web Design Degree through Google’s PageSpeed Insights program and the page scored 7/100 on mobile and 12/100 on desktop.

BTW, I hate the name. “Advancing” Technology? WTF? You don’t need “Advancing” because it’s implied. What it implies is there must be a University of Retreating Technology and that’s why there’s a need for a University of Advancing Technology—or UAT, as in “Where U AT?” (Forgive me.)

It’s a pretty messed up site. Reminds me of my site except they have squandered a lot of design talent.

University of Advancing Technology