Examples of Bad Websites

A lot of bad websites submitted to us are simply old, while others have no professional design.  This one is both!  If the copyright date is to be believed, this site is from 2001.  It claims to be one of the nations (sic) leading suppliers of parts and accessories for Harley-Davidson Motorcycles.  That seems hard to believe.

The catalog leads with calendars of bikini-clad motorcycle enthusiasts, and moves on to Zippo lighters.  Still not seeing those popular 'parts and accessories,' but whatever.

Hey, there's a page for Awards!  This website has supposedly (and unbelieveably) won Web Awards.  However, if you click on the 'awarders,' you'll either get an irrelevant real estate company's website, a broken page, or a domain for sale.  Not much of an 'award.'

Today's bad website is here solely due to the developer's ignorance of best practices.

Titles are recommended to be between 50-60 characters.  THERE ARE 1256.

Meta descriptions should be less than 160 characters.  THERE ARE 1256.

Meta keywords should be less than 10% of the total words of a page.  The landing page has 127 words, so - quick math here - there should be less than 12.  THERE ARE 66 WORDS AND PHRASES.

What we have here is a complete cluster which should infuriate any professional website developer.  Here at boogersite, we're basically holding up the "loser" sign on our foreheads to whoever committed this ultimate beginner and know-nothing sin.

Keyword game time again!  What do the words heavy, nylon, outages, plant shutdowns, and wacker make you think of?  Maybe a factory closed down with a giant week wacker?  Nope, it's a machine shop.  And if online directories which publish earnings are to be believed - a ten-million-dollar a year company.

Then why have this crummy old FrontPage website?  That's the big question here.  There's an invitation to take a virtual tour, but there's no video. The Staff page is "Not Found."  Something kind of funny is the employment application - asking all the way back to your Elementary school and "course of study."  For a machine shop!  Then again, it also asks about your typing and shorthand words per minute.  

The Testimonials are nice, but the most recent is from 2006.  Let's hope they have done some good work since then.

Right up front, we see a message that this website was last updated in July of 2005.  That explains a lot, because there is nothing modern about today's bad website.

There's no address, phone number, or indication of what this company does on the landing page.  Just a number of tiny little postage-stamp images, so we began to click on some of them.  It wasn't until the fourth one that we encountered a description of what this company does.  A few lead to Under Construction pages which is bad.  If the content's not ready, don't publish the page.

On-Line Ordering is a simple contact form, and Literature Request is non-specific.  We're tempted to request something from the NY Times bestseller list, just to see what happens.  Nah, we'll leave this old site alone, and you should too.

It sure is BLUE, isn't it?  The subpages are colored differently, but for some reason BRIGHT BLUE was chosen for the landing page.  If it was meant to grab attention - it did.  Notice we called this bad website "HOME."  That's because it's the page title.  There is also COMPANY, New Page 2, and REPS.  Use your titles wisely!

There's not a lot to do here. You can read about the company, although good luck with the Mission Statement - it's light yellow text on a light gray background.  You can email the company, or any of six reps.

Finally, there is a Products page which describes the differences between the four types of lubricants this company makes.  Maybe lubricant production isn't that exciting, but we wish this website did more to make us think so.