Misplaced Trust and Obnoxious Colors

So…  Our friend from the UK, James, turned us on to this god-awful mon­stros­ity com­plete with motion graph­ics and the worst col­ors ever ever used on a web­site.  The site is called Tried and Trusted, but noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.  The idea is a sound one, but the design makes me want to pull out all my hair and fire up an old Dead Kennedy’s album.  It kind of reminds me of what a Sid Vis­cous solo album would sound like.

They intend to review local busi­nesses and tell you, the user, which ones can be trusted.  Prob­lem one.  Yel­low is a hor­ri­ble color for trust.  The only thing you can do to make yel­low less trust­wor­thy is add red to it.  Oh..  They did…  So, we have a bright yel­low eye­sore with red accents telling us who we can trust?   Sorry, I’m not buying.

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of ani­mated GIF images.  One good thing about them is, they sup­port trans­parency.  For god’s sake, use it.  Don’t lay a graphic of a Union Jack heart (beat­ing, no less) over an exist­ing hor­ri­ble home­page ani­ma­tion and leave the frig­gin’ white box around it.  That’s just tacky(er).  Who­ever made that GIF should be shot, or at least slapped around a bit.  You can tell the beat­ing heart is an after­thought, but I hes­i­tate to use the word thought at all.

Well, as luck would have it, the sub-pages are all dif­fer­ent…  Wait…  The sub-pages are dif­fer­ent?  Yeah, they all look like a kinder­garten stu­dent pasted mag­a­zine clip­pings on a piece of ran­dom con­struc­tion paper.  Just boxes of text float­ing on a dif­fer­ent color for each page.  The fun bit is we have a “designed by” ref­er­ence at the bot­tom of the page.  It says AMPSUK.  I believe the ref­er­ence is “Amps UK,” but if you just leave off the AMP, you should get the point.

A few tips…

If you are launch­ing a new (and in this case “brand new”) web ini­tia­tive, it helps to look around at what other “new” sites look like.  It’s safe to assume the peo­ple involved with this one haven’t looked at a web­site since 1998.  If you are dumb enough to bother putting an “Under Con­struc­tion” graphic, why make the site avail­able at all?  Just put up a place holder page with a ref­er­ence to what day the site will be “done” and work in the back-ground.

Thanks James.  Why I’d thank peo­ple for show­ing me things that suck this bad is beyond me, but at least it makes for new con­tent, right?   For a real treat, feel free to check out the Clubs and Asso­ci­a­tions page.  Before you do, make sure you eat a big greasy meal.  Bangers and Mash, maybe…  If you don’t vomit, write in and tell me how you man­aged to keep it down.  If I were the direc­tor of a club or asso­ci­a­tion I would refuse to allow this site to link to my organization.

At least they can spell (and they keep the music to a min­i­mum), and thank god the clock is there to tell me what time it is…

With a Name Like Kluk…

So, the prophet of god has come, and his name is Ken Kluk (at least accord­ing to his web­site).  Funny, his web­site sucks.  I guess that’s why it’s here.

In the play The Sun­shine Boys, Willy Clark (played by Wal­ter Matthau), says, “[W]ords with a ‘k’ in it are funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a k. Ls are not funny. Ms are not funny.”  If that’s the case, Mr. Kluk is hilar­i­ous.  He is, after all, the world’s most pow­er­ful healer.  If I hap­pen to get the pneu­monic plague or herpa-sypha-gonna-litea-aids, I’ll be sure to give him a call.

We can poke fun at his name for hours (espe­cially for you slow read­ers), or get to the rea­son for being here.  His web­site blows.  Nev­er­mind the fact that he can cure what­ever ails you, and the fact that he seems to hate the pope.  If any­one can read the block in the upper left cor­ner, please tell me what it says.  My eyes don’t do micro­scope mode.  I guess the title of the site is “The Light of God Minis” because the “try” kind of washes over the falls there.  Here we go with pink and blue again (and not on a dog web­site, no less).  I’m sorry, it’s salmon… Nope, pink…

OK… If you want to send a mes­sage to the world, don’t put it in an ugly box with death threats against a reli­gious leader on its wrap­per.  You’re unlikely to con­vert many that way.  I’m pretty open-minded (what?  I am… Seri­ously…), so I thought I’d click on a thing or two.  Did you know that God wants you to Obey him, and con­ve­niently, there’s a list of steps when you click the insanely obscure and almost unread­able “What God Wants From You” link.  The first two I get, but the bat­tle armor?  There’s a link I didn’t fol­low that I pre­sume wants to sell me some of this armor.  I’m good, thanks.  It’d be tough to fly in that stuff, and I guar­an­tee the TSA would “ran­domly” select me for extra screening.

The fact that every page is a god-awful mess of sick­en­ing col­ors makes me sus­pect that he might not know what he’s talk­ing about.  Am I one of the cursed ones?  Do I care?  I’ll sleep com­fort­ably cursed, but know­ing that even my most half-assed attempt at design is less likely to injure some­one than this mess.  That, and I don’t have to use Yahoo site builder to make it.

Wanna see what reli­gious nutjob­bery looks like?  Try this lit­tle gem from his creepy “Dear­born City is Cursed by God” page. “The New­born curse that has been put on all the Al-Kita, mus­lims, by the Lord God Almighty, has been extended to all Dear­born employ­ees, their chil­dren, grand­chil­dren, par­ents, and all past and future gen­er­a­tions, for their sup­port, whether will­ing or unwill­ing, of the Al-Kita.”

What is Al-Kita, any­way?  Here’s another win­ner, “God Gived Mayor O’Reilly Up To One Year Before He Takes Him Out Too!.”  Folks, I couldn’t make that up if I tried…

Republicans Vs. Democrats — Part 2

I think it might be bet­ter to set up a sep­a­rate blog for this topic.  There are so many bad polit­i­cal / politi­cian web­sites it’s almost too easy to poke fun at them.  Well, it still needs to be done.

First up, fla­grant use of bad flash leads us to the inescapable con­clu­sion that polit­i­cal can­di­dates are all about shiny things and lit­tle sub­stance.  This guy (whose name reads like Sodom with a lisp) has a site that loads with an unfor­tu­nate series of chords and a stu­pid whoosh­ing sound when you mouse over any of his top nav­i­ga­tion but­tons.  The cheesy wav­ing flag at the top doesn’t help, but the real trav­esty is the flash win­dow that con­stantly rotates the demo say­ing some­thing about your busi­ness and its ben­e­fits.  It isn’t even semi-ok flash.  Sad…

This next one is bad, I just can’t put my fin­ger on what about it is bad.  Maybe it’s the blue on blue (and not even a good blue).  Maybe it’s the fact that the type-faces don’t agree and there are about five of them.  Maybe it’s the pixel­lated fonts where the text is embed­ded in an image (did they use MS Paint?).  No, it has to be the guy’s pic­ture.  Kind of reminds me of my Trig teacher from high school.  That must be it.

I speak Viet­namese, which is why I’m so dis­ap­pointed in this next one.  Would you think, like I do, that a doc­tor could afford proper web design?  I guess Dr. Pham isn’t your nor­mal doc­tor.  The pur­ple with black over­lays is price­less, as is his offi­cial photo.  The guy’s pol­i­tics can’t be as bad as his site.  I mean, Cal­i­for­nia is a stone’s throw from col­lapse as it is.  Any­thing is bet­ter than what they have now.  I just won­der if Dr. Pham is mak­ing a state­ment with his web­site (other than, “Hi, I suck.”).

So, lets say you start a polit­i­cal party in the mid 2000’s and you don’t know what to do with the web.  That’s for­giv­able.  Now, carry that into today and it’s just sad.  If you’ve had more than a cou­ple years and your site still looks exactly the same (com­plete with under con­struc­tion ref­er­ences) maybe you shouldn’t have a party at all.  There has to be at least one party mem­ber who’d do a pro-bono to make the web­site look like some­thing other than a high-school project done by two guys striv­ing for a “C.”  I guess the Peace and Free­dom party died in 2008 because there is no 2009 ver­sion.  Maybe it’s for the best.

Then there’s Elliot Gra­ham.  Well Elliot…  Your site is, um…  white.  The text is all cen­tered, you require that the poor folks who read it scroll not only a mile and a half south, but east and west as well.  I gen­uinely hope you make an effort to fix it, because a run for any office shouldn’t start with piss­ing off your poten­tial con­stituents (are you even run­ning for some­thing?  I can’t tell).  Nobody (and I mean absolutely not one soul) enjoys left to right scrolling.  Also, your pic­ture could stand a res­o­lu­tion enhance­ment.  He asks us to read every­thing on the web­site.  I don’t have that kind of time, man…

So, in an effort to make sure all par­ties are rep­re­sented in the Cal­i­for­nia Governor’s race, the Lib­er­tar­ian can­di­date has a web­site up.  A bad web­site.  WTF is it with peo­ple and cen­tered text.  You just grab a copy of front page and slap some text in there with a pic­ture and you’re on the way to the Governor’s man­sion, right?  Wrong.  Fix it, so as not to give Lib­er­tar­i­ans every­where a bad name.  Don’t worry about nav­i­ga­tion or sub-pages, just throw every­thing on there and rely on peo­ple to scroll.  I lost inter­est with that statue of lib­erty tiled back­ground to be honest.

So, what about a con­gress­man who’s been there since 1979?  Has he had enough time to earn a few bucks?  Of course.  Too bad the guy that was hired to make his web­site never learned about con­trast.  The header is black, and the image it’s sit­ting on is mostly black.  Makes for dif­fi­cult read­ing.  The rest of the site isn’t too bad, if you like text that bleeds out of its box and white on light blue links, but…

So, part two is over, and it was mildly enter­tain­ing, but there won’t be a part three.  Not until the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.  As polit­i­cal sites go, these all suck.  If one presents itself that’s at least as bad as the first one in part one, I’ll post it as a stand-alone.  Feel free to con­tact your local politi­cian and tell him that his web­site sucks.  Maybe he’ll do some­thing about it.

Republicans Vs. Democrats — Part 1

Yet another wind bag infested elec­tion cycle is com­ing, and with it a whole new crop of ter­ri­ble polit­i­cal web­sites.  Some cam­paigns get it, and make spec­tac­u­lar web­sites.  These are not those cam­paigns.  Look­ing at these, it’s no won­der we run a sick­en­ing deficit in almost every state, and politi­cians seem to have dif­fi­culty tying their own shoes.

Before fans of the politi­cians in ques­tion go off about how I’m anti this, or pro that, the only thing I care about is design.  I don’t care what your party is, I don’t care what you’re run­ning for, I don’t care what your hat size is.  You need to real­ize your site is the face of your cam­paign.  If you can’t take that seri­ously, be pre­pared to have some stuff said about you that you may not like.

Check this guy out.  He’s run­ning for a seat in the US House.  You’d fig­ure a house run war­rants a bit more design than glue and mag­a­zine clip­pings.  Not this guy.  Let’s hope this page is a place holder because I’d hate to elect a guy this dis­or­ga­nized to Fed­eral office.  His ideas may be great, I just can’t get past the web­site to take him seri­ously.  Do-it-yourselfers are funny, and so are their attempts at web presence.

This one, at first glance made my head spin.  It reminded me of some­thing a come­dian would do as a joke.  I was right about the come­dian part, but the joke is on him.  He is a come­dian, and has a fol­low­ing.  So why on earth would he sub­ject us to this back­ground?  If he’s seri­ous about run­ning, maybe he should hire a web guy.  Any­thing is bet­ter than this.  It just hurts to look at it.  He must have taken lessons from miauk.

This poor guy went with one of those polit­i­cal web­site ser­vices.  You’d fig­ure a “ser­vice” would be able to insure the text didn’t lay on top of itself, but you’d fig­ure wrong.  The site itself is pass­able, but if you can’t read what a can­di­date says, are you going to vote for him?  I’m not.  I’m also not using this ser­vice, based on the results I see.  I love the idea of hav­ing to copy and paste just to see where my can­di­date stands on the issues.

I’m hop­ing that this one (hell, all of these) is a work in progress.  I would think any­one run­ning for an office like Gov­er­nor would be able to afford a web designer, but I guess I’m wrong on that one.  Even a mediocre designer can be hired for a few hun­dred bucks, so what’s the deal with a brown site and all bold text?  I have decent eye site, but am I the only one who has trou­ble with the links being micro­scopic?  Not get­ting my vote…

I don’t even know what to say about this one.  Steal­ing the “We Like Ike” cam­paign slo­gan is fine, but what on earth is going on with that pic­ture?  The main prob­lem I have is, why bother with an under con­struc­tion mes­sage?   Don’t put any­thing there if you have noth­ing to say.  If it takes you longer than a day to pop­u­late your site with your polit­i­cal mes­sage, you shouldn’t be running.

I can’t fig­ure out what the hell is going on here, but aren’t Democ­rats typ­i­cally the more “Mac” friendly crowd?  Lib­er­als usu­ally have more of an eye for design than this (yes, I’m stereo­typ­ing, get over it).  I’m at a loss as far as the lay­out (and I use that term lightly).  I have no idea what they were shoot­ing for, but they missed…  By an insane mar­gin, they missed.  Is there even a design in there?  If you find it, let me know.  Also, if you use free host­ing, just shoot your­self.  If you can’t afford $5.00 a month maybe a web­site isn’t for you…

Prob­a­bly worse than a crappy guber­na­to­r­ial web­site is a crappy sen­ate web­site.  Here’s a hint…  If you oppo­nent has a web­site and yours is more than 10% crap­pier than his, you’re going to lose.  Run­ning for Sen­ate is some­thing done by mostly rich folks, and rich folks buy decent web­sites.  If you want to look like you have no money, do your web­site your­self, or have your cousin Jimmy do it.  You know Jimmy, the kid Grandma thinks is just a wiz on the com­puter?  He can’t make web­sites, so stop let­ting him.

Make sure you check out the “pres­room” page of this guy’s site.  He’s the CURRENT gov­er­nor of the state of Nevada.  Go back and read that again.  Yeah, cur­rent, elected, gov­er­nor…  You’d fig­ure that as a gov­er­nor, you’d be able to afford a decent web­site, but if you can’t, at least put some­thing other than “Under Con­struc­tion” on it (You’ve had 3 freakin’ years, pal).  If you have noth­ing to put there, don’t put the page up.  Did I men­tion that he’s the gov­er­nor?  Oh, and hey…  Aspect ratios, espe­cially on your offi­cial photo…  Yeah, they’re impor­tant…  No excuse, folks.

I was ready to for­give this guy con­sid­er­ing he’s a city coun­cil can­di­date.  You have to fig­ure they have less to spend and less time to work.  Then I noticed the ani­mated gif of a wav­ing flag and the fact that he used Front­Page 6 to make the site.  So much for civil­ity.  There’s a les­son to be learned here.  Don’t do what he did.

This is vol­ume one, and peo­ple keep send­ing them.  If you have one, by all means let me know.  These guys need to under­stand how their web­sites make them look.  Here’s a hint…  The phrase “not good” doesn’t begin to cover it.  What’s sad is, even a lousy Word­Press theme makes all these sites look like microwaved dog shit.  What the hell were they think­ing when they gave a thumbs up?  Have they seen another web­site before?  Any web­site?  I guess there’s no account­ing for taste.

Stick around, there are some worse ones com­ing up.

Flash Websites Still Suck

So…  I’m mind­ing my own busi­ness, tool­ing around the Inter­tubes like I do so often, and what should hap­pen but I stum­ble across a sucky web­site.  I don’t know if it’s just me, or if every­body does but I gen­uinely can’t fig­ure out why there are so many of them.  It seems like would be site own­ers like bells and whis­tles more than they like their cus­tomers to actu­ally be able to fig­ure out what it is they do.

I give you GBL Archi­tects.  The image sim­ply can­not do it jus­tice.  I cap­tured a moment in time with that screen­shot.  What’s prob­a­bly the fun­ni­est thing about this whole fiasco is, I waited for over ten min­utes for it to load.  Mind you, I have one of the fastest res­i­den­tial Inter­net con­nec­tions known to man, but I still waited.  Not kidding.

As if the weird page load issue weren’t bad enough, the com­pany logo loads then breaks apart into a mil­lion lit­tle pieces and the pieces start bounc­ing around the screen.  Now what?  As it turned out, I was wait­ing for the page to fin­ish load­ing (mainly because Fire­fox told me I should), but the entire time I should have been mou­s­ing over the lit­tle bro­ken pieces of the logo for con­tent.  This page is so huge, it ran a dual core Intel proces­sor at 90% of CPU load, and I’m not exaggerating.

I was also wait­ing for that ridicu­lous back­ground image to flip over (it changes when you refresh the page, but none of them look quite nat­ural).  Have you ever walked up to a build­ing in your entire life to see what it looked like, then faced away from it and tilted your head back­ward to get a bet­ter look?  Nei­ther have I.  The rea­son I never have is, I’m not retarded and all of my body parts work the way they were intended.  What, then, is the rea­son for this image?  The only one I can come up with is, it was taken from a cell phone by a frat boy who woke up after a hard night of drink­ing and wanted to record his first moments of con­scious­ness.  That would also explain the rest of the site, so we’ll run with it.

Let’s see if we can iso­late the design phi­los­o­phy.  Make it HUGE, make it con­fus­ing and make it impos­si­ble to nav­i­gate. Brilliant!

I’m going on record as say­ing that the guy who designed this needs to be strapped to a chair and beaten with a dead fer­ret by a drunk clown until he promises on pain of death never to do it again.  It just plain sucks.  If any­one in the world asks who designed this in the inter­est of hir­ing him, I’ll per­son­ally hunt that per­son down, dead fer­ret and duct tape in hand (and I’ll find a clown).

Seri­ously, what on earth would pos­sess any­one to do this to his own cus­tomers?  There is noth­ing cool about mak­ing things impos­si­ble to find.  Hell, half of the lit­tle bits of the logo don’t click, and the ones that do you have to chase down.  I’ve about had enough of this crap.  Stop design­ing all flash sites, you dolts!  It’s not cool any­more.  It’s like disco, the IROC-Z and the mul­let.  Knock it off!

The absolute worst part of it all…  SOMEBODY PAID THIS IDIOT!

I’m done now…  I need to meditate…