Examples of Bad Websites

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.

Wow, this site sucks. There isn't even an easy way to tell what they are talking about. One could guess from the url that they do repairs on driveways or roads, but there is nothing to confirm that suspicion other than a list longer than an L. Ron Hubbard novel.

We are going out on a limb but it appears that this site is trying to help owners of paving companies find the right domain name for their website. I guess it would have been too easy to tell us the purpose of the page. The value of the information is questionable at best and even the author warns not to trust the copy. "Compiled over 6 years by many sources and is not accurate."

Visitors can learn more about the pavement industry by playing on the expressway. If your website has a purpose make sure that your web pages fulfill that purpose, or you're just wasting everyone's time including your own.

MySpace, Facebook and Twitter prove that the masses want their piece of the web. These sites also show that most of these people are horrible designers. At the same time, hobbyists using these tools can create a page that is useable and gets their message to the masses. With tools like these available, the average person should use them, instead of posing as web designers.

The Hell's Belles Car Club is an example of a site that means well and is aimed at a specific audience. This type of site is perfect for for a site like MySpace. They would still have the same control without alienating their audience. For example, they introduce the standard red color scheme, only to abandon it on all of the secondary pages. Likewise, they feature an icon-driven menu and then maroon users on all of the other pages. The only way to navigate through this site other than using the browser buttons is to use the "back the hell up" link that drops users back to the index.

Let's be honest, the Belles should stick to their passion of classic cars and let the pros do the web work.

Oftentimes it's the small things that can ruin a web site, like not having clear branding or annoying Flash banners. To make matters worse, the company logo is not present on any other page except for the home page. The name of your company and what you do should be the first things that someone sees when visiting your site.

Most of the pages have little to no visual interest. The home page has a feature of a trainer and a photo of Jack Black, but apparently they are not fans since they buried it at the bottom of the page. The photos they have on the other pages are limited to blurry or out of focus postage stamps.This website should be a tool to get people to the health clubs for a visit but the designer hasn't given visitors any reason to go. Digital photos are a cheap and easy way to show people what your business is about.

With two branches and a fitness trainer to the stars, you would think that The Fitness Club could afford a professional website that shows they are serious about their business.

If you can remember Jellies, neon plastic, Cavaricci jeans, Wayfarer Sunglasses, Bolo ties and Skids - you are familiar with things that may have seemed like a good idea at the time but would be laughable today. Likewise, website design often falls victim to the peace-sign-wearing, hippie designer that forgets what decade they are in. This website dates back to 1990 and it looks like it. Just because you have a website that is 20 years old, it doesn't mean that it should be a time capsule.

Consistency on a website is important, it keeps your visitors from getting lost as they travel from one page to another. On this particular website that is as outdated as pea-green shag carpet, they just need an escape hatch that sends the user anywhere on the web other than Cinema Scene. The secondary pages switch design on a whim and in a lot of cases have no design or navigation at all.

There are a lot of good online resources for movie reviews. Our advice is to save your time on this one, it simply has no plot.