Examples of Bad Websites

It's time to play the keyword game again.  If we found the following keywords associated with a website, what would you logically think the website was for?  Elderly, nursing home, hospital, software, translations.  Go ahead, guess.  Assisted living for foreign senior citizen programmers?  THAT would be logical.  Instead, you have a private investigation firm.

What is more surprising is that this old-looking website has a copyright date of only 5 years ago.  It looks much older - and when you're trying to convince potential customers that you have the most high tech equipment and services, your web presence should be as current as possible. 

We tried to view this website on a Blackberry, and it's still loading.

Problem #1: Can't tell where they are
Problem #2: No indication of what their service area is
Problem #3: No SEO

If you were searching online for a company that rents bounce houses, you might eventually come across this website if you went through page after page after page of results. We encounted bounce house rental companies in Buffalo, Reno, Chicago, Sacramento and all over the country in the 13 pages of results we paged through - yet didn't come across this website. Even if we had - you can't tell where this company IS! We're also doubting the statement "For Any Occasion". It's pretty obvious that there are many occasions where a bounce house would be totally inappropriate.

A good web developer would've insisted on text that made sense to the traffic you were trying to attract.

It's time for another keyword guessing game!  If we gave you the keywords "Bear Paw Fur Dressing, skull work, and asian taxidermy school", what kind of website would you think they were from?  A restaurant?  A Norman Bates fan page?  Nope - the website being 'keyworded' is (or was) for a taxidermy school in Montana, USA.

Taxidermy is considered by many to be an art, as is website design.  However, no art was involved in the creation of this website that we can see. We're not even sure this place is still open, judging from the invitation to 'click here for 2009 registration form'. 

Maybe it's just us...but the photo of the 'academy' here looks more like a crematorium from a horror movie.  The kind of building where you try to warn the characters to stay away from by yelling at the TV?  Just sayin'...

Anyway - to our designers' minds - if your website is really about a taxidermy school, examples of the handiwork to be learned should be prominently featured. Unless...it's not deer heads and trophy fish being stuffed here.

Ernest P. Worrell was a great character played by Jim Varney.  He was a practical yet zany man, so perhaps it is fitting that this tribute website can be viewed as "zany" as well.  However, we're not certain whether the designer is in on the joke or not.  It's entirely possible that this website was created by dumping every available corny and outdated gimmick into a cauldron, and boiling it over a fire for months.  The distilled result was deployed in 2000, and here you have the Jim Varney Tribute and Fan Site.

Although the onsite counter claims well over 200K visitors, it is tracking every visit to the landing page, while in the same session.  While looking through the site, we logged several 'visits' ourselves.  There's not much in the way of navigation, but the links down the left side lead to some real time-wasters, requests for donations, and some pretty crazy stuff.  Consistency in the theme went out the window immediately, and the subpages are boogersites in their own right. 

R.I.P. Jim, it's too bad this website cannot.