Examples of Bad Websites

Let's pretend for a minute that your company unfortunately went out of business.  Show of hands - who votes to tie up loose ends by taking down your website and terminating your hosting agreement?  Ok - most of you.   This latest bad website is a victim of what happens when you don't.

This website used to be for a bakery that was well-known in its area.  Genuine Italian pastries and wedding cakes, all made with recipes from 'the old country.'  Unfortunately, when it closed, no one thought to take down the website - and now it seems to belong to the Japanese.  Thanks to Google Translate, we're able to discern that the site now promotes (in Japanese) Roofing Contractors and Painting.

What good this is to the Japanese is a mystery.  Going to a website titled ninnisbakery.com to look for roofing and painting (in Japan?) seems to be a hard way to go about finding a contractor for your project. 

This cannot be a real website.  It simply can't, especially if the images of what look to be nuclear power plant cooling towers have ANYTHING to do with this company.  If Power Chemicals does something as simple as selling products to power companies, you'd still think/hope/imagine that a professional image for such a serious business would be important to both seller and buyer.

In this case - Frontpage (6!!) is no way to go about portraying a professional image.  Who knew there were any living Frontpage websites still alive out there? 

We double-dog dare you to click on some of the microbiological problem Gallery images, but only if you're nowhere near eating lunch.  Another treat is the Paper Specialties page, entirely in Japanese.

Most of the site is unreadable, having colored text on a patterned background.  Another example of bad website design that could have been avoided by applying some common sense.

Often, bad websites are submitted for to us that turn out to be very small one or two-person companies.  We won't use those, it's not fair to point out website shortcomings of a company that may not have the funds to do any better.

Today's boogersite seemed to be one of those situations.  Surely.  The site is small, nearly bereft of content, and has a Flash element (how outdated!) on the landing page.  Checking a popular business directory that shows earnings gave us a shock - this company makes a LOT of money.  So what's with the crummy website?

Sometimes, a company doesn't want to portray themselves as too successful, or consumers think they already have it made, and they'll spend elsewhere.  The website actually says this company employs 550 people, which might be the most interesting piece of information we see.  Eh - maybe we're nitpicking.  If the company is doing well, and hasn't seen the need (obviously!) for a newer, more informative website...we'll just stand by for the next truly bad website.

This latest website is shockingly bad.  Just hover over the header, and you'll see.

There is so much wrong with this website, it's hard to know where to begin.  There's an ad crawl for completely irrelevant websites (50 Reasons Not To Vote for Bush, BadAssChick magazine, ENBI IS NOT DEAD); flashing animated gifs, outdated landing page content - a film premiere announcement from 2006 - and hundreds of links to interesting articles.  Seriously - they are horrid visually, but contain some fascinating information.

A very telling reminder of this website's age is the subscribe page.  You're to print out the form, fill it out, then mail it with a check.  A check!!  The 'webmaster' also has a prodigy.net email address.

Thanks for submitting it, alert internet user.  Keep 'em coming!

It's keyword guessing game time again!  What do these keywords imply that this website is about?  Women-owned, air-seperation (misspelled, btw), zero helium, el dorado, smackover, and stoody?   A bunch of nonsense, right?   No!   It's a welding supply company!   How did you not know that?   Hint:  'welding supplies' would've been a great term to make this landing page about instead of the nonsense stuffed in as "keywords" - when in fact, none of those terms are even present on the page. 

Other issues include the old-style small content box, wasting a lot of screen-space, and there's no sense trying to view it on a mobile device.  Blurry, low-res photos are also in heavy use.  Clicking on the logo from any of the product pages leads to an utterly blank page.

To sum up - it's odd that a company that claims to be the "The Largest Woman-Owned Industrial Gas and Welding Supply Distributor in the United States" (and presumably successful) hasn't paid much attention to their poor quality website.