Worst Websites of the Year: 2013 - 2005
It's amazing how much garbage passes for web design.
I started "awarding" the uncoveted "Worst Website of the Year" back in 2005. There have been way too many winners.
Worst Websites of 2012
What can you say about a year in which the world is supposed to end? Well, the ancient Mayans believed that but, unfortunately, their world ended long before 2012.
I keep hoping bad web design will end, but I'm not that optimistic. The year 2012 was a doozy.
Worst Websites of 2011
Good golly, Miss Molly. You may have heard the term "Responsive Web Design." Well, Web Pages That Suck has been providing you with 16 years-worth of UN (Unapologetically Not) Responsive Web Design. The sites selected during the first nine months of this year provoked such responses as "Holy, Mother of God," "My eyes! My eyes!" and "You've got to be (kidding) me."
Over 60 sites are up for Worst Website award, including Xerox (pictured above), Pine Sol Trader Joe's, Staples, Symantec, and Ben the Bodyguard.
Worst Websites of 2010
Like most of 2010, it started off slowly and then the suckiness started to creep its way through the good design. By the end of the year. Wow. It sucked.
Notable examples include Yale School of Art, God Hates Fags, Got Milk? and whitehouse.gov.
Worst Websites of 2009
The year 2009 was a great year for bad web design. There were so many examples I had to break them into six different categories.
We have three different categories for businesses, and one each for Over The Top websites, Non-Profit websites and Honorary Worst Websites of the Year (these sites changed their look during the year and "improved" enough to exclude them from the finalists.)
Notable examples include Harvard University, Xerox, Hermès, Leo Burnett, TechSoup and the Republican Party.
Worst Websites of 2008
2008 was another good year for bad web design.
Like every year since 1996, I hoped that this year would be the year when we'd only have 10-15 sites that were truly awful. Dream on. I suspect I had 130+ candidates for the top ten. I haven't seen so much crap since the guys at Evergreen Plumbing opened my septic tank and let me look inside.
Once again, I had to create multiple lists to cover all the suckiness.
Notable selections include BEA, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Architecture.
Worst Websites of 2007
Unfortunately, 2007 was among the worst ever for great web design, but it was wonderful for bad design. Most of the sites look like the designer never read (or ignored) my article Does Your Web Site Suck? Checklist #1 — 155 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell.
Most of the sites featured on Web Pages That Suck also committed one or more of the Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 including the following:
- We've designed our site to meet our organization's needs (more sales/ contributions) rather than meeting the needs of our visitors.
- It takes longer than four seconds for the man from Mars to understand what our site is about.
- Our site looks like we've never seen another web site.
- We use design elements that get in the way of our visitors.
- Our site doesn't make us look like credible professionals.
Notable selections include Microsoft, NASA, the US Marine Corps, MIT Architecture, Brown University Research, El Paso Water, Hartnell College and Ace of Cakes.
Worst Websites of 2006
I love great web design. The designers who create great web sites know that you have to combine content and design in such a way that a web site flows seamlessly from page to page. The visitor never has to ask, "What do I do now?"
Unfortunately, these sites don't feature great web design. I broke 2006's worst into two groups—"Regular" websites that sucked and websites that sucked because of their navigation.
Featured sites include Brown University, Tampax, Diners Club and Crumpler Bags.
Worst Websites of 2005
I started Web Pages That Suck back in 1996 and every year I've planned to hold my version of the "Razzies for the Web." I wanted to honor those web sites that made us feel good about our skills — "Hey, my site isn't THAT bad."
In 2005, I created my first collection of "Worst Web Sites of the Year." The first year's crop of 10 sites was selected from 293 sites that appeared in The Daily Sucker. Of that total, I considered 117 bad enough to be possible candidates for the "Worst Web Design Techniques Featured on Web Pages That Suck in 2005." The short list consisted of 57 sites, of which there were 10 "winners."
Notable selections include Brown University Graduate School, Superior Court of California County of San Francisco, Pope John Paul II
