Examples of Bad Websites

A show of hands, please - how many of you enjoy, revisit, and actually hire companies with cluttered websites?  Just as we suspected.  NOBODY, except for those two jokers in Hawaii.  A site that looks like this one will quickly shoo away potential customers. Messiness makes people uncomfortable, and also looks unprofessional.

If your website is not neat and clean, potential customers will assume that you won’t be either.  Additionally, a well-designed website can make your operation seem bigger than it is.  If you have a professionally developed website, your online visitors will assume that you have a professional operation.  If your website looks cluttered and amateurish, you will likely miss out on a lot of business.

Take a look at your competitors' websites.  If yours looks bad by comparison, our sponsor can help.

The user who submitted this boogersite invited us to check out the menu page, saying that the fonts are all over the place.  No kidding - and even more interesting is that the 'bar menu' is displayed, but the food menu cannot be accessed.

There's a lot wrong here - including the date/time display that was not given enough room, and the non-working "Box Pix" page in IE.  Designers - don't forget about Internet Explorer.  You may not like it, but it's still the most popular browser in use.  Figures from Wikipedia (compiled from different sources) show that browser usage as of July 2011 breaks down like this:

IE 40%, FF 26%, Chrome 18%, Safari 7%, Opera 3%, mobile 7%.  (rounded)

Anyway - in closing - we agree with the submitter's comment "WHAT is with that happy trail shot in the header image??"

We suspect that a concerned fan of a new show called Dance Moms (on Lifetime) submitted this boogersite.  It is, as they say, a hot mess.  Yes - both the website and the show.  Dance Moms seems to be all about making young dancers cry, from what we could see. The dance school featured on the show has a website which might make adults cry. Web developers and designers - better grab a tissue before you click on it.

If developer is to website as choreographer is to dance - the choreographer (had there actually BEEN one for this website) would've been fired.   For those of you non-dancy people, a "ballet  d'action" is defined as a ballet with a plot, usually tragic.  This is the perfect term for this unorganized mess of slop, featuring (we believe) every font color and style available.  There is no nav whatsoever, and who needs it?  The site is one page that will take you 71 'page downs' to get to the bottom of.

Watch the show at your own risk, but definitely skip this website.

It's really a shame when a site about disaster readiness is a disaster all its own.  The FEMA for Kids website is blindingly 'boogersite yellow', for starters - and there is way too much of it.  With the tiny font used on most subpages under small icons, it really causes eyestrain very quickly.

Most of the games & quizzes require IE 4, which may qualify the website for federal disaster funds (call us!).  A lot of the links lead to broken or missing websites.  Perhaps the most telling indicator of design strategy is the banner commemorating that this website was the Gold Choice Award Site for 1997.  A website from 1997 should probably win the Golden Fossil award.

This site may have appealed to users who were kids back when the site was created, but today's sophisticated youth wouldn't spend any time with Herman, the (and no, we're not making this up) "spokescrab" for the website.

This website was submitted by a person frustrated by their search for a plumber in their Florida town.  We have no idea how they stumbled upon this particular website, as it has no keywords whatsoever.  We tried searching "we are in the Florida area", which (believe it or not) is text from the site.  The "Florida area"?  It is a pretty big state, but "in the area' could include Georgia, Mississippi, and the entire Gulf of Mexico.  (We'd hate to see the service call charge for that...)

There is just nothing on this website that tells about the company or the services provided, except that it was founded in 1972.  Maybe that's when the website was 'founded' as well.

If you're going to pay for a domain and hosting...you should take full advantage of the opportunities that a website presents.