If you still haven’t updated your website, or looked into adding any online marketing strategies such as artificial intelligence, don’t worry too much about the latter (but do worry about the former, i.e. updating the website—here’s why). In fact, not every business website is built equally; in this article’s case, some have fared far worse than others in the past year.
We’re sure you’ll feel better about your website after you check out some of these stinkers (especially if you’ve already hired us at V3 to develop it!). Here are some of the worst websites from 2018—plus, valuable lessons we can all learn from them about our own websites or future updated ones.
(Note: grab your barf bag if you’re especially sensitive to bad web design—things are about to get real ugly.)
- Penny Juice
One look at the colours on Penny Juice’s website says it all: they have no idea what colours they wanted to use, so they figured, hey, why not use them all?!
This is a site that fails on so many levels, offering us valuable lessons all the while. For one, its interface is far from user-friendly, forcing you to scroll down in order to access any of the other web pages available, plus it’s hard on the eyes given all the rainbow colours it pukes onto visitors.
Herein lies some of the basic lessons we all need to take to heart:
- Pick one to three colours for your brand, and stick to them
- Don’t force users to scroll constantly throughout your website
- Never go the DIY route of web design, no matter how tempting that budget may be
- Arngren
Yes, believe it or not, this is a real website that exists (for the record, all of the websites we feature here are real). This is a Norwegian classifieds website (i.e. they post items for sale, like the newspaper does) that denies every good rule about web design! If you remember the awful design of classifieds in telephone books back in the 1990s, here’s that similar design brought to life in 2018.
Here’s some of the many, many web design sins that Arngren has committed:
- Incorrect colour usage in terms of design
- Poorly implemented navigation
- No clear message about who the business is
- Small and confusing writing from a reader’s POV
- Random colours with no rhyme or reason
So, class, here is what you should take away from this lousy site’s examples:
- Get a second pair of eyes to look at your site’s colour usage
- Design a site that makes it easy for you to navigate, i.e. any human being who ever lived
- Form a clear call to action and message about who you are as a business
- Make it easy to read your content, and make sure the text is big enough to be readable
- Again, be very specific about the colours you want to feature on your site
- Antique Bottle Collectors Resource
Here’s a real doozy! Mr. Bottles.com is a headache to look at for very long, but here’s what we could discover:
- The color of the text constantly changes, making your head spin.
- The images are randomly put in different places without any order or formatting.
- Bad navigation.
- Too much content, which you don’t really want to read.
It’s one of the worst, but even saying that, the worst is yet to come…anyway, here are what takeaways we all need to take to heart after viewing this dizzying example of an awful website.
- Most images are made static on websites for a reason. Slideshows are okay, but don’t overdo them.
- Use some sense and some logic with the images you place on your site, whether it’s your products or a featured image to go with your blog post.
- Again, always make sure your site is easy for you to navigate through, and thus it’s easy for everyone to use.
- Try installing a blog if you’ve got a lot of content to share, and let people browse it in their own time (make sure there are categories and tags if you have a lot!).
- Mednat.org
Mednat.org has so many things wrong that we don’t even know where to start. Here’s what we could comprehend from this site’s madness:
- A tiny font size
- Zero structure (no logical website sections exist)
- A giant wall of content per page (each one containing enough text to fill 20 pages!)
- Zero mobile responsiveness
- Spammy text (i.e. there are numerous links to Wikipedia.org)
- Poor usability throughout the site
- Where2Eat.com
Actually it’s Where to Eat, however the web address insists on including a 2. That alone proves there’s some severe inconsistency going on which as we all know results in poor user experience and zero conversions made. There are tons of issues, but here are a few worth naming:
- Inconsistent choices in font style and size
- Poorly developed color palette, plus images and text just don’t match
- 90s web design visuals
- Too much effort to get to other web pages, i.e. navigation problems
- Lists mixed together that really, really don’t go together, consisting of many items unrelated to one another
- No clear call-to-action, so no one knows what to do on each page
- No proper home page or first screen, so no one understands what this website is for!
Pretty much almost all of the lessons we can take to heart have already been mentioned before; usability, clear calls to action, and straightforward design are all mandatory to feature on a good website. In this case it’s as if the web developers knew about the rules yet completely ignored them. At least it has secure SSL, which is something a few of these stinker sites lack, however the rest of what Where to Eat has to offer is terrible. Let the lesson here be not to let web design like this get greenlit for launch.
Bonus Site: This one. Made on Purpose.
It is, without a doubt, the World’s Worst Website. Ever. Avert your eyes!
We apologize in advance if any of these websites belonged to you, but maybe…maybe…you should consider getting a new website designed, or built from scratch. If you’ve identified any of the major, major flaws these stinker websites have featured on your website, let us know at V3 Media—perhaps we can help. If you want a second pair of eyes to at least check on your site, we can do that in a one-on-one consultation as well. Let’s get together and laugh at these monstrosities—it beats looking at them by yourself and crying at how bad they are for sure.