Examples of Bad Websites

It's really a shame when a site about disaster readiness is a disaster all its own.  The FEMA for Kids website is blindingly 'boogersite yellow', for starters - and there is way too much of it.  With the tiny font used on most subpages under small icons, it really causes eyestrain very quickly.

Most of the games & quizzes require IE 4, which may qualify the website for federal disaster funds (call us!).  A lot of the links lead to broken or missing websites.  Perhaps the most telling indicator of design strategy is the banner commemorating that this website was the Gold Choice Award Site for 1997.  A website from 1997 should probably win the Golden Fossil award.

This site may have appealed to users who were kids back when the site was created, but today's sophisticated youth wouldn't spend any time with Herman, the (and no, we're not making this up) "spokescrab" for the website.

This website was submitted by a person frustrated by their search for a plumber in their Florida town.  We have no idea how they stumbled upon this particular website, as it has no keywords whatsoever.  We tried searching "we are in the Florida area", which (believe it or not) is text from the site.  The "Florida area"?  It is a pretty big state, but "in the area' could include Georgia, Mississippi, and the entire Gulf of Mexico.  (We'd hate to see the service call charge for that...)

There is just nothing on this website that tells about the company or the services provided, except that it was founded in 1972.  Maybe that's when the website was 'founded' as well.

If you're going to pay for a domain and hosting...you should take full advantage of the opportunities that a website presents. 

Deciding which submitted sites are true boogersites is a tough job.  We get many that are simply ugly.  We get submissions for small one-person businesses, and that's just not fair.  Primarily, we get a lot that are basically just outdated.  This is one such website. One cardinal rule has been broken here, though.  Contact information should be on each page.

While the website functions as what we presume it's meant to - displaying products, viewing the catalog, finding a distributor - the renderings, drawings and photos are all so low-res it becomes difficult to tell what we're looking at.  That is a big no-no.  If your website is meant to promote a product - your site visitors had better be able to SEE what you're offering.

This website claims that "Beautiful Things Happen".  Well, we're still waiting...unless they meant in the STORE.  There is nothing 'beautiful' about this website - at all.

Maybe it's a game?  Count how many different font styles there are.  No one here can remember when that was trendy - but we all agree it was never a good idea.  The site visitor counter, which really dates a website, jumped from 5188 to 5193 while we were reviewing the site.  At an average since 2001 of only 1.42 visitors per day, that's a huge increase in traffic.

You can click on a magazine cover for Home Theater Interiors, to see the Nov/Dec 2001 issue's cover in better detail. You can watch some words scroll across the screen, a few product categories that can't be clicked on, until you get to Upholstery and Drapery repeated 19 times.  Yes, we counted.  There is also a blue and white scrolling invitation to "Let us design the look you have been looking for!"  We can only hope this company's interior design skills are far superior to their website design capabilities.

The person who submitted this site described it as having: "mystery navigation, skewed photography, roll-overs-to-negative, general badness".

"General Badness", which sounds like an awesome character in a not-yet-written movie, does indeed describe this site. This restaurant is presumed to be a great place to eat if you believe the rave reviews (from 2005!) on the site - if you can find them, that is. By the way, these reviews, as well as any site content in pdf form, should open in a new window. Needing to click the browser's back button to return to your website is no way to treat a visitor.

You might have the greatest product, service, or restaurant EVER - but if you are still depending on word-of-mouth or Facebook to attract new customers (instead of a great and well-made website), you aren't taking advantage of the most cost-effective advertising available today.