Examples of Bad Websites

One of the first questions that we ask new web clients is the purpose of their website. E-commerce, corporate information, tourism, educational...you get the idea. Then you design around your purpose. If you have no purpose, then you create the Chicken, Alaska website. After you tire of the chickens chasing the cursor (which was never a good idea, not even when everyone still liked Bill Gates), you are left with a poorly executed attempt to be cute and no real idea of what the site is about.

The whimsical navigation may look good on a sign or poster but on a website it should be a tool to move from page to page. Evidently the fine folks of Chicken did not intend for you to go beyond the index page since they never got around to adding content to most of the interior pages.

We really wanted an official "I got laid in Chicken, Alaska shirt" but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page just to add it to my cart. Once on the cart page we are faced with choosing between secure and unsecured checkout, just in case you do not believe in hackers.

Ok class, quiz time! The purpose of a store - you know, those buildings that you used to go to when you wanted to buy things? Before the internet? Ok, I'm losing you. The purpose of a STORE is to do what?.

Surprise!

The answer is to sell products, yet we run into sites like this all the time, where you have to hunt for something to buy. South Sea Rattan does not let you make any purchases online but you would think that they would want to at least SHOW you what they want you to buy right up front.

It sounds simple but a lot of websites fail to think of their users. Put yourself in their shoes! How easy is it for your customers to get the information, or this case, products that they need? Web users do not want to think, so we have to hit them over the head with what we want them to do on our websites. Just remember if you don't connect with your visitors, your competitors will.

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.