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.
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MIA
What the heck is MIA? Well our best guess is that this is a website for an indie music label promoting hip-hop and dance groups. So let's talk about the website. This site instantly earns a place in the boogersite hall of fame for the background alone. MIA is without question the very definition of fugly, in all of its seizure-inducing glory.
The background blends into the logo and the giant banners so it difficult to discern one element from the other. The eye-bleeding colors also make it difficult for any of the headers to stand out. The secondary pages are thankfully just as bad. The page for "Boys" has a video clip in the background that caused our browsers to shut down during our review.
Bottom line, this website epically sucks and nothing short of a giant magnet to the web server can make it better!
Outlet Discount
We have our first nomination for the colorblind award for 2010. Independently, orange and blue can make great palettes for websites. However, these two colors used together are terrible. To make it worse, the web designer uses font colors that would not fit into any color palette, just to make sure that they are difficult to read.
The overall layout here is not bad, but they insist on putting so many products per page that the site feels cluttered and makes for a poor shopping experience.
Once a user makes it to the shopping cart, the site becomes painfully slow and unusable. The form fields are not formatted and it is difficult to determine how to even place an order. The best way to reach epic failure on the web is to make it difficult for your customers to buy your products!
Computer & Ink R Us
When the purpose of your website is selling computer ink, one of the worst things you can do as a web designer is to showcase ugly colors. The logo here is simply hideous. How could anyone trust advice from a company that modeled their logo after Rainbow Brite? The rest of the colors on the site are not any better and a lot of the text is very low contrast and difficult to read.
The image on the home page is overexposed and doesn't appear to have anything to do with selling ink. A small caption could go a long way in this case. It gives your visitors some context for the visual elements on your pages. The navigation is long and the sub-headings are barely distinguishable from the rest of the categories. It is important that your visitors can quickly glance at your menu and find what they are looking for.
Your online store should be an accurate reflection of what your physical store would look like. The sign for Computer & Ink R Us would be so loud and obnoxious that only the disco crowd would shop there.
Kay Lee Roast Meat Joint
All we can say is wow! We had planned on describing how bad the animation is on the Kay Lee Roast Meat Joint, but you should see it for yourself. Go now! All we will tell you is that it features a Ninja pig. Nothing about this website makes us want to chow down on hunks of meat.
At this point, even bad web designers know that placing those stupid counters on your website is a bad idea. This, however, is the first time that we have seen one featured so prominently. If you're bad and you know it, you might as well flaunt it!
The logo and navigation are in frames so you will have no idea where you are if you don't enter on the index page. The logo is blurry and does not match the background and the menu matches nothing on the page at all. If the web designer had only spent more time actually working on a design rather than playing with the meat.
Baby Oxide
Baby Oxide is an absolute mastery of awfulness! It makes us remember the good ol' days of GeoCities (R.I.P.) with its rippling water java applets, animated dripping blood horizontal rules and who could forget the flickering candles. Granted, the site has not changed in 7 years but for Pete's sake man, it is time to bury this thing.
As an experiment in all things terrible, Henry is certainly entitled to create as many crappy .gifs as he wants. After further inspection, we noticed Baby Oxide offers computer and web design services. As a business, this website is truly offensive.
Prospective clients must be able to trust a web designer and be confident in their skills to create a professional presence on the web. If you're creating animated Scotty dogs, you're probably not in any danger of getting many new projects.