Just a small hijack. The reason that FedEx founder Fredereck Smith recieved a “C” from his professor at Yale Business School was not that his professor was a critic, but that his professor was a staunch anti-war activist and disliked the fact that the business plan was based on the ‘spoke and hub’ method that the USAF, USN, and USMC handeled logistics (cite: Harvard Business Review, “The Unknown Vietnam Vet Manager,” May/June '86.)
I decided long ago that “websites that suck” sucks. Good URL, crappy website.
I’ve always thought 1728.com was ugly as sin, in a bizarre, ten years ago sort of way - the background image, the huge table borders, etc. What I really don’t get, though, is isn’t there another widget you could use instead of textboxes to display the results of calculations? It seems so odd that the results of a conversion inputed into one textbox appears in another.
Site names are important, too. Even though 1728 is cool (equalling 12[sup]3[/sup]), it’s not a show-stopper.
But, if you had simply added one to 1728, you’d get 1729. Now there’s a number that’s interesting in and of itself.
Why?
1729 is the lowest number expressible as the sum of two different cubes in two ways, i.e:
1729 = 10[sup]3[/sup] + 9[sup]3[/sup]
and
1729 = 12[sup]3[/sup] + 1[sup]3[/sup]
[sup][sub](all of the foregoing with apologies to Ramunajan)[/sub][/sup]
3 Million and 1.
I played with the calculators for an hour. Cool stuff, but um yeah, kind of boring looking.
Again, thanks to all the “Dopers” for the replies and the suggestions.
Okay, I won’t respond to those comments at the WebPagesThatSuck reply section. I might send an E-Mail to “Mr Suck” and say it would be a courtesy if he would send an E-Mail to all websites he has chosen. (I found out the news by reviewing my statistics). Heck if he’s going to choose so many websites, he’d better put his website where his mouth is and E-Mail ALL websites thus “honored”.
I was impressed by his remarkable lack of credentials for judging my site:
*Yep. Classic suck. On the other hand, it looks like it has really great content (unfortunately, I’m Math-impaired and can’t tell about validity, but I have to assume everything is accurate).
*
Maybe he’d appreciate the site more if I had pages featuring “An Andrew Dice Clay Retrospective”, “Fordzilla - the Monster Truck Legend” and “Delinquency For Fun and Profit”. Well maybe some day, he’ll get his high school diploma and move out of his mother’s basement.
This has been a fun pitting. 
Add 14 gazzillion porn pop-ups and a Gator Module prompt.
I kid, I kid!! 
How about not responding? Really, if you and I don’t care why should they? 
That bastard!
I have a question unrelated to the perceived ugliness of your design.
Can you make a time calculator that also subtracts?
The one on your page that adds hours, minutes and seconds will start getting used at the radio station where I work, tomorrow. But subtraction would be ideal for backtiming.
I used to have a Casio, one of their cheapest models, like $8, that did time calculations. It went missing in my airline baggage en route from Toronto to Orlando nine years ago. They don’t make it anymore, and I’ll be damned if I can find one anywhere. I even wrote to Casio. No such luck.
But thanks loads for providing yours!
He’s not joking either.
Permit me to add something to this discussion, wolf_meister. I’m starting to get a little bothered by how often you try to plug your site on this board. It seems that every time someone asks a question about calculus, or college physics, or anything of the sort, we will get a post by you saying little more than “hey, come check this site, there’s information about anything you may want on this subject!” And very often you don’t even mention your interest in this site. And now we get this Pit thread, which is guaranteed to bring you even more hits.
Make no mistake, I’m not bashing you or anything, I’m sure that your site’s content is good (I’ve never looked at it in detail, though, just browsed through it one of the times you linked to it, and again this time to take a look at the design), and it’s okay for you to be proud of it and to try to lead other people to it. But could you at least, say, mention that it’s your site when you link to it, such that people know what your interest is?
I think you’re missing the point of webpagesthatsuck.com – nobody’s concerned about the objective value of your site. webpagesthatsuck.com is a resource for fledgling web designers. It’s about design. There are plenty of websites that are (on balance) great fucking websites – but have really, really crappy design: Just from my bookmarks:[ul][li]www.craigslist.org[]b3ta.com board[]www.aintitcool.com[/ul]All of these sites have serious design flaws – but nobody cares too much about the design, because they deliver good content.[/li]
From a web designer’s point of view, content doesn’t count for squat. In most cases, you have very little (if anything) to do with it. Your job is to present in an aestheticly-pleasing and intuitively navigable format. “Webpages That Suck” is about looking at unfortunate design, to give people an idea about what not to do. It’s a public service, really. I remember working with one person who wanted to put a javascript “tickertape” blurb in the status bar, (On a commerce site!) because she thought it was “kewl.” No matter what I said, she still pushed for it. She thought I was just stepping on her to be controlling, or something. Pointing her in the direction of an essay on “Web Pages That Suck” about why you shouldn’t hijack the freaking status bar with pointless content finally convinced her that it was a bad idea. Thank god for wpts.
Sorry for that digression. Anyway, from WPTS’s front page:
(My emphasis.) Anyway, don’t take it so personally. From a design point of view, yes, your webpage sucks donkey balls. That’s not really such a big deal. There are plenty of slick and pretty design-heavy webpages out there – pages that are perfect examples of elegant design – which, nevertheless, suck in ways that no designer can ever hope to fix. No content, no site.
craiglist.org is just about the ugliest site I’ve ever seen. It looks like it was designed by a glue-huffing monkey in 1992 and never updated. I still go back there again and again, and I don’t care at all about the design, because it’s a kick-ass site. Some sites emphasize function to the total exclusion of form. So maybe your site is one of them.
If it doesn’t bother you that it’s ugly, and it doesn’t bother your users, well, who cares?
webpagesthatsuck.com isn’t there to be the arbiter of what has practical value. It’s a resource for beginning or hobby designers, to help them get an idea of what looks good and is easily navigable.
I’d still at least ditch the background tile, though.
Yeah, frankly, I have to say that I’m irritated with his constant mentions of it. I’ve sorta found this annoying for a long time, but not annoying enough to mention . . .
Yeah, it looks kinda crappy. But it does what it’s supposed to do, without confusion or ambiguity. And I’d take that, in any combination of colors and backgrounds, over something that looks pretty, but runs slow (by using copious unnecessary javascript, flash, etc.) any day. It’s not aesthetically pleasing, but I’d say it’s well designed, in that sense.
Ow! My retinas!
**severus and Excalibre **
You do raise an interesting point about my referencing my website - a LOT. Yes, guilty as charged.
For one thing, I make about 4 postings per day which I think is too much (whether I reference my site or not). I know the mods always caution about “posting parties” and padding a post count. In my opinion, I’d rather keep my post count low.
To be truthful, (and it is hard to believe) but I have been trying to mention my website less and less in recent months. With that in mind, I decided to research some of my recent postings.
On September 11, 2005 there was this thread:
*My boxing coach’s website went down because the person he paid to run it would not pay the bills. How do we get the domain name and make (or hire someone to make) a web page?
*
I suggested that they try doing it on their own and referenced this website which has no connection to me whatsoever:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/6658/links.html
A thread about Oscar winners who had “fallen” the farthest:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=332915&page=2&pp=50
See Posting #80 - Considering it was about Oscar Winners in the major categories I thought it was worth referencing.
Aug 29, 2005
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=331949&page=2&pp=50
A physics quiz everyone was talking about and mentioning questions and answers. I uploded it to a free site I have just to make it easier for everyone to reference. (It was pretty hard to follow when people would say #23 was worded poorly but I had no trouble with #38).
http://www.geocities.com/internet_web_surfer_dude/physics.htm
Aug 22, 2005
A thread about electric guitars:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=6516538#post6516538
I referenced a LOT of websites in that one - including mine.
Aug 22, 2005
Thread about metric mileage (miles per gallon vs liters per kilometer and so on)
I referenced my metric mileage converter.
Aug 19, 2005 - Straight Dope Political Compass
I volunteered to make the graph and upload it to my website.
Just trying to help out. Next time I’ll have someone else make the graph and use their own website.
severus
You said that “very often you don’t even mention your interest in this site.” Heck, I thought every time I referenced my website I would always mention it was mine. (I could be wrong. If you could find an instance where I haven’t I’d like to know where I slipped up.)
If I really wanted to promote my website, I’d have a signature line that would display it for every post I made.
So, I will seriously curtail the references to my website.
I am not offended by your comments and I will take the advice under serious consideration. I think most folks on the SDMB have a favorable view of me and I wouldn’t want people thinking I’m being obnoxious with my website.
Dubya bashings will continue on their regular schedule though.
Come again? I’ve visited the site by clicking the link in your post and the worst I can say is that it’s a rather bland-looking site with an unfortunate favicon. (Purple peace sign? What was he smoking?) I can’t see it as ugly, especially not bad-website-circa-1992 ugly.
The color scheme is white and light grey with hints of blue and yellow, not my favorite scheme but certainly easy on the eyes. The content (it’s a big classified ad site, correct?) is logically arranged and easy to find, modulo the need for horizontal scrolling. (I hate having to scroll horizontally. Web pages should conform to my window size and only slop over vertically. CONFORM, DAMN YOU!) And beyond that… nothing. Not so much as an image.
How is that webpage ugly? (Personally, I even like the multi-frame discussion forum layout. Frames are easy to completely screw up, but there it seems to map nicely to the actual content.)
I imagine you don’t have the time nor inclination to update the look of your website. Fair enough. Might I suggest calling your local college or trade school where web design is taught and asking if the professor would like to present your web page as an example of “function over form.” And then ask the students to design a better web page as part of a project? The “winning” student will have his name mentioned on your new, re-designed website and you’ll have a new, kick-ass web page.
Just an aside - “hits” is a totally irrelevant web measurement, and the pronouncement of such went out oh, about 5 years ago.
How many visitors/visits do you get?
(I’m sure you get plenty, which is great - just irks me that people think the number of hits a website gets means anything at all)
Wolf, 1996 called. They want their Web site back.
Seriously, you’ve got a great site, but it suffers from a serious case of retro uglies. In its favor, there’s no irritating MIDIs, Javascript, Flash, frames, or “This page must be viewed in Internet Explorer” disclaimers. What’s wrong, IMHO:
- Long main page; something typically associated with bad Phemomenal Women-style glurge pages. (Hate to say it, but the majority of PW glurge pages (pops) have 9-11 memorials (MIDI) too.
- Tables with large beveled edges: very mid-1990s, and something that, yes, is encountered on PW-style glurge sites.
- Lumpy textured wallpaper is very old-fashioned.
- White, blue, yellow and pink color scheme - yikes! This can help.
- Multiple text colors – purple, blue, and red – in different sizes. Looks a bit Time Cube-ish.
- Stock e-mail box graphic.
- Unmunged e-mail address and mailto link = spam, spam, spam, spam, spam spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam.
It’s not so much one of these problems that is so bad, but all of them together on one page that … uhhh, could make your site appear in WPTS.