Examples of Bad Websites

Everything about this website makes us want to take a black marker to the screen to spare our eyes from any more torture. The interface is old and tired. They are still designing for 800 x 600 which makes the site look like a postage stamp on any modern screen. The most egregious offense is the Flash navigation that forces the user to chase the menu items around the screen.

Once a visitor does manage to select a menu item, they are presented with a small area of worthless text that does very little to promote Wallace Computers. Most of the sections are either blank or contain cryptic words with no point of reference. The background music is distracting and never a good idea unless you are selling music.

Any designer that is considering a web interface entirely in Flash should consider this simple question: Can the element that you want to do in Flash be done using JavaScript and html without losing functionality? Most of the time that answer will be yes and you can save yourself from creating embarrassing pages.

Apparently no one informed the Rangers that Geocities died and that we no longer have to use the twinkle star background. Here, we find an exceptionally awful example of a website. If we had to guess, we would say that it is a site for retired members of the Canadian Rangers: Vancouver Chapter.

True to the Geocities model, there is no structure, form, design or menu, just a long list of links that all turn out to be photos or photo albums disguised as YouTube videos. They do seem to have an obsession for drunk dolls and a loose Barbie.

After some research we discovered that the Rangers are a division of the Canadian Army, yet this site seems to be focused on on airplanes and air shows. Maybe you have to be Canadian to understand the content here but everyone can agree that they do not know how to build a useable website.

While we learned a long time ago that "We don't need no education", when surfing the web we do need sites that give us at least a hint as to what the site is about. Just as we came to a consensus that the site is loosely about war and the history of war, we discover links for football, Watergate and Martin Luther King. It should be common sense to design and provide content around a theme, you get bonus points for telling users what the theme is.

The author claims that he established the site to be a place for active learning, yet there is no interaction or discussion at all. The only thing that a user will find is seemingly unrelated subjects and articles that are more like an inferior version of Wikipedia.

Educational success largely depends on the curriculum of the classes that the student is taking. In this particular case, we have no idea what the class is even about. Mr. Bruner, next time publish a syllabus so we can at least make some sort of sense out of your endless ramblings.

Another brilliant example of a bad Flash introduction that is implemented poorly. They force you to suffer through it with no way to skip to the content and we are hoping that this was done as a part of a 3^rd grade project because that is about the only way they could have gotten a passing grade for this garbage.

We finally made it to the index page and immediately wanted to go back to the Flash intro. We realize that this is an old site but this was bad a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. There is no style or design in any shape or form. The logo floats in space and doesn't fit with anything on the page and most of the links result in 404 errors.

Kitchen Accessories one of the few pages that actually exists, looks like someone started a page but never finished. There are beginnings of a header and product title but nothing on the page looks finished. The secondary links merely list products and give users no real information other than part numbers.

Image and brand defines all businesses and organizations, but typically smaller groups like historical societies use the lack of funds and resources as an excuse to create horrible websites.

With a little time and some research, anyone can create a decent website. However, not only has the TRAA not created a decent website, the image they are projecting only serves to drive people away from their organization.

The TRAA website has no structure, color scheme or anything else that would remind someone of a real website. Sometimes creating a bad website can do more damage than having no website at all.