In this particular thread, I don’t think that warnings are necessary. Expect pain.
And the best subset of this is when they just tell you the password requirements one by one.
- Type in ‘mypassword’
- Password must be a minimum of 11 characters
- Type in ‘mypasswordisreallystupid’
- Password must be a maximum of 15 characters
- Type in ‘mypasswordsux’
- Password must contain at least 1 number
- Firebomb the people who set up this asstarded password system
SUPER Bonus Points if the password creation is part of a longer form and each time you enter an invalid password, it clears the rest of the goddamned form. :mad:
That fills me with grrr. We have a form like that at work. Fill in all of the fields and submit, and you’re golden. Omit one dropdown, and the rest of the fields unpopulate, and the back button won’t save you.
Yes, I was a web designer on that project. No, I didn’t design that particular page.
Sheriff Departments quite often have poor web sites. I had to research a bunch of different Florida counties for planning info and for many of those counties the sheriff department was the only web site. They generally followed a pattern: black background with yellow text. There is usually an animated gif of police lights and often a midi. The Law and Order Theme was well-represented but one county had “Mission: Impossible” playing. Great message there, guys! Most of the sites had links to state level resources such as missing children lists and offender databases (which are better done, btw). And few of the sites actually listed helpful information such as THE NON-EMERGENCY PHONE NUMBER! According to their websites, the only way to contact the sheriff in some counties is by dialing 911. And of course, there was rarely any contact info for other local or county agencies.
Fire Department websites seem to suffer from similar problems.
After writing all of this I went to revisit some of these sites and saw that almost all of them had been updated and improved. I detect the heavy hand of state-level law enforcement since most of the websites use a similar “sheriff-ey” theme now.
But here’s Franklin County’s site. Still somewhat like my complaint: Freeze!
That “websites that suck” is kinda… badly designed.
Is that on purpose?
-FrL-
<BLINK>
The information you were looking for.
</BLINK>
It’s not that badly designed, sure the navigation table is a little big but that’s about it.
Some of these sites, I have a feeling that they were designed by the persons son, betting his uncle “10 bucks says he never looks at it.”
If you’re talking about Web Pages that Suck! then yeah, I think it’s not that great of a website either. They make excellent points about usability and interface, but their own site isn’t particularly well designed. And no, I don’t think it’s on purpose.
The baby badge at the top left is amateurishly cropped. And not particularly tasteful. The banner has the information loaded on the left 3/4 or so, while the right has apparently random padding. Why not throw the badge all the way to the right, where it naturally seems to belong? At least then it would balance the ugly baby graphic on the left.
They put a border around the content, which you usually do to force a consistent layout even if the user resizes the window, but the content does resize to fit the window on their site.
The overall page design is bad in that resizing smaller — around 80–75% of the starting width or lower — breaks it badly. That’s why well-done sites will not resize or rearrange elements in an attempt to match a size smaller than their native layout; they’ll keep a minimum size and let you scroll to see the whole thing rather than attempting to dynamically change elements to fit. This page rearranges, breaks layout, and also makes you scroll.
Resizing larger actually makes it better in some ways, since it cleans up the navigation bar a little. Sites with an actual layout will just add “whitespace” if you expand the page to larger than their native layout.
The menu bar across the top has bizarre layout, with no hint of standard spacing between entries. It looks like they padded the same amount around each element, but didn’t bother to do an overall layout within the menu bar. Resizing the width to only slightly smaller than the default breaks the menu bar almost immediately.
The animated “NEW!” GIF in the left bar next to “Contender for Worst Web Site of 2008” breaks one of their own rules about readability, and it looks amateurish, and motion like that is annoying. Animated elements are almost always a bad idea, because they make a web page…well, suck.
The whole navigation bar on the left would be much better if they either listed only main categories, with a linked sub-page for detailed links, or used some kind of interactive interface elements to expand or collapse the list. As it is, it takes two pagedowns to even see all the navigation options. This would be an appropriate use of Java, in contrast to the good points they make about when not to use it, but I guess interactive interface elements besides plain-vanilla HTML are too “Web 2.0” for them.
The main categories in the navigation bar look like they’re navigable interface elements. On mouseover you would expect some interaction like the menu bar (properly) has, or a cursor change from pointer to hand to indicate a link. Nope, no link, no interaction, because each category is a simple text element with no linked sub-page despite the triangle at the left — which usually indicates interaction like collapsing or expanding.
The text inside the navigation bar is not laid out well. In particular, the right margin is horribly jagged. Vertical separation between elements is poorly done also.
The content itself is not organized in any particular way other than by loose categories bounded by boxes. Without doing three pagedowns, you don’t see all the topics they have on the site.
That’s just a non-exhaustive analysis of the first page. I visited about three sub-pages at random and found a graphic element that breaks the layout at its default size on the second one.
I’m not a design expert. A friend who is, and who made me aware of design issues like those I’ve outlined, would have a long, long list of changes they should make. It’s not a particularly bad page, but it’s not a good example of design, by any means.