Examples of Bad Websites

Websites have about 3-4 seconds to grab the attention of visitors before they bounce to your competitor's site, so while this site may not seem "bad" on the surface, it is about as boring as we have seen. To be fair, they write chemical studies (egads) but even screenshots of their studies or a scientist or two would liven up this dead page.

The most recent information that we could find is from 2003, under heading verbiage indicating that these were the 'most recent studies'. Not a lot going on in lately, eh? Are you folks still in business? This is another death sentence for websites, especially one that by nature has a smaller audience. Often, companies forget that websites are living documents and they should be constantly changing and being updated.

The navigation is worth mentioning here as well since you might miss it if you have any trouble seeing variances of blue. When choosing color schemes, it is important to ensure that there is enough contrast in colors that will be overlapping each other.

Wow! If we didn't know that there are a lot of sites like this, we would just dismiss this site as being a horrible assault on the eyes. We will admit that this is way over the top and the web designer almost had to be trying to create this Masterpiece of Disaster.

One of the things that everyone can learn here is that more is usually NOT better and that the newspaper classified section is not a good web design standard, and surely not if your web hosting company is charging you by the pixel.

When building a website it is not necessary to copy your competitors down to every detail but it is a good idea to have at least seen some of the websites that you are competing against. We highly doubt that Haven Works has ever seen another news site and even wonder if they have ever looked at their own site when not under the influence.

You have created a beautiful logo and want the whole world to stop everything and take a gander at it. At least the page is clean. Splash pages (pages with nothing on them but a Speed Buggy tire logo) serve absolutely no purpose other than making your visitors go away. Seriously, this page gives us no reason or desire to want to know anything more about this site. If you do decide to venture forward, you will need to guess where the link is because the cursor does not change to indicate a link. Tsk tsk!

As a general rule of thumb, designing around a shape or image is a bad idea. We have seen a few sites over the years that have been able to pull this off, but you should avoid it if you can. For one thing, you designed this menu around a giant image for the home page, what about the secondary pages? Remember consistency is king for any websites, don't make your users relearn your navigation just because you have a new version of Photoshop and a digital camera.

Backgrounds and even textured backgrounds can add some visual interest and drama to your page, this is not it! When you have a really strong background you need content on top of it that is strong enough to compete with the background. If you are going to throw images and text on top of bricks, at least make an attempt to make it look like they belong there! We've also never seen a street address in feet and inches! 121 5'th ST on the corner of 5"th and B Ave. Weird.

Let's talk about page titles, this site is a good example of what NOT to do. What is worse than having bad titles for your pages or even no titles? Using "Blank" for the title of the page. Titles, while a seemingly minor issue, are really helpful for visitors and search engines.

The wooden buttons are ugly but I would worry more that the text on them is difficult to read. Simply bolding the text would have helped here.

The pages on your website should all look similar. It is called consistency, folks! There are only three pages to this site and that is being generous since they did not even make an attempt at the About Us page. Maybe they used up all the content on the eerily similar "History" page, which lacks a way to get back Home.

Some old guy wrote that a picture is worth a thousand words. Actually, that saying is from a Chinese proverb but that's not the point here. So this page says nothing unless you bother to read the text and no one wants to do that. Minimalism and pink space can be very effective (somehow? somewhere?) and we are a big fan but this web designer didn't even attempt a design.

Web designers love to experiment with color, which is fine as long as you can read it. putting text that does not stand out on a colored page is useless. The black text here is not terrible but the contrast is not as high as it should be when you have a lot of text.

He did attempt a logo but it appears to be broken. However - as this company calls itself "Practitioners of Knowledgism" (I think they made that word up, stand by - I'm going to check) it should go without saying, but please LOOK at your pages, if you have a broken image then fix it dear Henry!

News bulletin: the word 'knowledgism' seems to exist, but only on websites of 'knowledgists' that are trying to sell you their services. The (ahem) 'definition' is: Knowledgists are aware of what they know, what they do not know and even that they know they do not know. My brain hurts.