Examples of Bad Websites

There are countless examples of embarrassing website designs and development out there. These are the latest examples we have discovered. For each site below we provide a brief analysis to assist you in avoiding the same pitfalls.

After looking at the websites and critiques below, please visit our free advice area.

Help us clean up the Internet!

Submit your own bad websites.

Sherwood, Logan & Associates, Inc

This wholesale plumbing website looks like it was done by a plumber in his mom's basement. This company is trying to convince their visitors that they should buy plumbing equipment from a company that doesn't care enough about their own company to present an acceptable image of itself. It's like a 300lb man showing up for a job interview in nothing but a wife beater and a g-string.

There is no branding, yet they felt the need to include an animated bar of color that serves no purpose. Next we have a list of items that look like a menu. They aren't. Most of the sub-pages feature incredible animated artwork including money going into a toilet.

Sherwood-Logan & Associates, Inc. has been in the wholesale plumbing business for 31 years and their website is related to the products that they sell - something that came out of the toilet.

line divider

Jarke Corporation

Jarke's website is a colorful piece of crap resembling gaudy Victorian wallpaper. The logo looks more like an 80's hair band than a legitimate company selling industrial storage systems. The entire site is plagued by animated gifs. Seriously folks, the cheap animations are not fooling anyone. They are not cute and they make websites look like a bad porn site. If your website is representing a professional company, then the website should damn well look professional.

The information request page is a mess with fields all over the page. If you do not make an effort to make your forms attractive and easy to use, your users will not use them.

We will give them some credit for the kangaroo fact page because it is sooo cute and adorable, complete with more badly drawn kangaroos. We have never talked to a kangaroo, but would be willing to bet a pint of piss (Australian for beer) that a kangaroo would not endorse this website of its own volition.

line divider

Stop Alien Abductions

Alien abductions are bad mmm kay? Apparently we are prime targets for an alien mind control attack and most of the world is oblivious to the impending peril. Thankfully, Mr. Menkin has been protecting brains for the last ten years. The testimonials claim that an ugly hat has changed their lives. In fact, they have reached a whole new level on the social outcast scale. We would like to think that this is a joke and the author enjoys making fun of the real kooks that believe this sort of crap. The truth is that as you read through the pages, it is clear that this guy is certifiable.

With such a brilliant and essential tool, we were shocked that Mr. Menkin would have such a horrible website. Aliens probably abducted the real website. There is no color scheme, branding or visual interest to the pages and the only alien photo is the decades-old alien autopsy. Surely one of the many abductees has a more recent photo. The navigation is done with frames which makes bookmarking difficult. Also, search engines will not be able to properly index the site.

 

line divider

Keen Fighters

One of easiest yet overlooked improvements for a website is to let people know what the site is about. A user should not have to search for a meaning hidden somewhere in your pages. When it comes to Keen Fighters, the text is unreadable, the background is hideous and from the looks of it no one uses this website and why would they?

The author states that he has the web skillz that he needs. "I've been creating communities for a long time, but never had the experience I have now. I would always leach off of people to do my work; such as HTML, Image Designing, Lua Coding, Website setup. Lucky I've gotten past that, I now have all of those abilities and I can do it when I need it, and to the standards I requier." Even if this webmaster was blind, this site would be unacceptable. If you are going to design a website at least do us all the courtesy of spending five minutes on Google learning how to create a white background.

The good news is that you can get lifetime access (to what we still don't know) for only $10.

line divider

NetPipes

There should absolutely be an expiration date on websites. We worry about pollution and littering, yet we allow any yahoo with a wysiwyg editor to pollute the internet with trash that they have no intention of cleaning up. NetPipes is a great example of a bad idea that has festered into a landfill over the years.

They start out by having you choose the entrance to their site. By now it should be common sense that an entrance page is bad mojo. So making the user choose between two intro pages is nefarious at this point. Normally the Flash intro would be considered the more heinous of the two options, but in this case the standard html version is far and away more offensive. These butt nuggets chose to recreate the Flash intro into pages with 'next' buttons. Mom must be proud.

The lesson here is to keep your website current. The NetPipes website is just too easy to make fun of.

line divider