Case Study: Bad Website #2

Here's another absolutely horrendous website. Not just a subjective opinion here; this website fails virtually every aesthetic and usability test that exists. Shall we get started?

Poor Use of Screen Space

White space can be a beautiful thing; if used appropriately. This website has gigantic gaps between different page elements. This necessitates vertical scrolling just to see the main navigation on most current screens. The information that is 'above the fold' is barely enough to even identify the name of the website.

Distraction

There is an animated GIF of a pump jack in the upper right corner. There is another in the main navigation for 'Cool Links' (in and of itself a particularly antiquated and useless piece of information) and as you dig deeper in the site you'll uncover a wide variety of little animated nuggets. Mercifully, the one saving grace is the ability to click the 'Stop' button on your browser to put these little disasters out of their misery.

The repetition of the organization's logo in the page background is also a nice touch.

Style Issues

This page makes use of on-page style declarations, as well as inline styles. It does not have an external stylesheet. This ensures that the website will look inconsistent across browsers, media and screen sizes. But then again, a dog's breakfast is a dog's breakfast...

Deprecated Code

There are myriad instances of the <center> tag. In fact, at one point in the code of this page there are 1,893 nested <center> tags. No exaggeration. I guess they want to be absolutely, positively certain that everything on the page is centre-aligned. Well we can tell you that, in fact, it is.

Massive Home Page Size

This page, while relatively devoid of images, is monumentally large. While this has relatively little impact on load time (11.25 seconds on an ISDN connection) it almost guarantees that visitors will see little of the content. Without a proper navigation structure to guide the visitor to what they're looking for, they will simply give up after a few page scrolls.

Lack of Scannability

All the text on this page is simply dumped in. Headings are rare, sub-headings non-existent, and nary a <blockquote> or bulleted list exists. Couple that with a 100% relative page width, and the entire site is almost unreadable when a visitor's browser is maximized.

Redundancy

On an already massive, disorganized and visually distracting page, adding in duplicate copies of logos, images, text and hyperlinks only amplifies the other problems.

Software-Dependent Files

This site links to a variety of Microsoft Office files. Ideally these should be converted to Adobe PDF or another relatively software-independent platform.

Mis-sized Images

The readability of various images on this page has been compromised due to incorrect height and width specifications within the <img> tag.

Inconsistency

Every colour in the rainbow is used throughout headings and graphics; even a rainbow coloured horizontal page divider. While the site sticks primary to a sans serif font, just about every sans serif font that comes with MS Publisher is used.

The Final Word

This site sucks, no doubt about it. This may be excusable if it was assembled in 1991 and then abandoned, but there is current information scattered throughout. And the saddest part is that this site is the official site for a professional organization with over 50,000 members. So whoever is maintaining this site might benefit from a quick web design refresher course.