Examples of Bad Websites

Does anyone else find it ironic that a website for an ammunition maker is also promoting the Marvels of Fruit?  Mixed messages aside, when you build a website you should have a theme for it.  The design theme (such as it is) doesn't go any farther than the front page.  This website is confusing as they make bullets (we think) but are they making them out of bananas and oranges? If you are going to make and sell bullets then skip the fruit!

The author warns us that interrupting him to check on your order status only slows him down.  How 'bout an online order status area, then?  Don't bother leaving a phone message either, he doesn't call people back.

Ammo and oranges - rock on!

Ling's Cars qualifies as a bad website due to cluttered and busy pages, lack of consistency, tons of flashy blinky things and no sense of a color scheme. At the same time this site is genuinely funny and they are not afraid to make fun of themselves. The site receives almost 1.5 million visitors a month, so something they are doing certainly attracts people to their site.

Despite Ling's success, the pages on the site are a mess. At the same time, this is also part of the site's charm. They have an amusing web game that is impossible to win, talking heads and "chinglish". Ling even claims to show you how to get a free car if you stop smoking.

In this case we would have to say that this site is an exception to being a true 'boogersite'. We are not saying that it could not be improved but the unorthodox method appears to be working.

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!

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!

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.