I just find the colors too bright and really, really hard on my eyes. I was seeing images burned into my eyeballs for a minute afterwards.
There’s nothing wrong with function over form. But at least make the form not actively painful. If I had to choose between a calculator on your site and someone else’s with a less blinding color scheme, I’d probably choose the latter just because I don’t like making my eyeballs hurt.
First let me say I’m a big fan of WPTS. And yes, it sucks on purpose, so as to demonstrate what not to do.
The big problem I see with your site (besides being ugly): it’s not immediately obvious what the purpose of your site is.
Here’s what I see when I pull up your site:
Sept 11th Memorial
1728 Software Systems
————————————————————
In 2002, OVER ONE MILLION HITS !!!
In 2003, OVER 1.3 MILLION HITS !!!
In 2004, OVER TWO MILLION HITS !!!
Thanks to everyone for making “1728” a very popular site !!!
————————————————————
New !! Search Our Website
By Entering Search Terms In The Box Below
> > > > < < < <
Then Press “Enter” On Your Keyboard
————————————————————
OR you can still “search” using these directories:
If I scroll down, I see the calculators, etc., but NOTHING in what is initially visible gives any clue to what I might search for.
I’ll choose function over form anyday. I visit craigslist at least once a day and I never thought its design was lacking. Must be me. 
3 million hits doesn’t mean shit, dude. A “hit” is not a unique visitor, it’s a count of every file on every page being loaded, or reloaded. Conceivably you may only have 1000 unique visitors on a site like yours and still get 1000000 hits.
So, really, you have an astoundingly ugly site that isn’t anywhere near as popular as you seem to think.
It’s not bad for a website designed in 1995.
It’s not a design I would choose, but I don’t think it warrants being singled out as ‘sucky’; still, your best bet would be to shrug it off; arguing with a self-proclaimed authority like Flanders (not that his work is completely without merit) will just make you appear whiny and will probably prove his point.
Sticks and stones; change your site design if you want to, but not because one man says you should.
Why is the most frequent complaint in this thread about the site concerning the grey tiled background? I wish we had MORE of that. My eyes get tired after awhile and sometimes I want to just read straight text. Give me black on grey any day when I’m reading for information.
Now, the bright yellow table background, on the other hand…
Black on grey is fine. The objection is the texture. It just looks plain stupid and ugly to anyone with a sense of aesthetic.
wolf_meister will you improve your website now that you know it looks dated and ugly?
Your “terms of use” are sure reminiscent of web sites built in 1996. This is precious:
Well, you’ve got a solution for the WPTS problem! Just revoke their right to link to you!
As far as your “style”
>>>> goes <<<<
[size=7]* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I don’t “see” anything “wrong” with it!!!
[/SIZE]
I do, however, think your “open mailbox” icons look a little lonely without their usual companion, the “under construction” icon.
I may have been a bit hyperbolic, there – of course it’s not nearly as ugly as 1728.com, but I was deliberately selecting websites that are arguably excellent, but weak in design.
craigslist has some serious design flaws. The colour scheme is a bit of a problem for a text-heavy site. Light blue text on white is a strain, and using red and purple is especially annoying. Black text on dark grey for headers? No sense of appropriate contrast. And no webpage should ever have an element that is purple text on bright yellow. It’s just nasty.
The main thing, though, is the poorly thought-out navigation from the beginning. “Gotta get everything on the front page!” Fully a third of the page is dedicated to a tiny-text, questionably-organized table of cities. This is something that most people will select once and then bookmark, and yet there it sits, occupying 33% of the page, after you’ve already selected your city. If this huge and next-to-useless table was removed, the rest of the page would easily fit on the screen, eliminating the need to scroll around. Just about any other approach to navigating to the desired city’s page would be a huge improvement.
All that said, craiglist is still an awesome site, which is why I mentioned it. It’s got really bad design, but it does what it’s intended to do so well that it’s easy to overlook its flaws.
It’s not so bad, but for the yellow. Maybe a nice light blue would be more soothing against the gray background. Or black and white all over.
But **wolf_meister ** I have a semi-unrelated question for you… Do you know of a calculator on the web that will allow you to enter two dates dd/mm/yyyy and tell you in years, months and days how long a time has passed between them? I’ve found a couple that’ll give you an answer like 824 days, but would rather find ones that tell you 2 years, 3 months and 4 days.
It’s an old school design. Hit back with the Content is King rule and how your design have met the Three-clicks navigation law. However, I regret to inform you that you may have failed the “odd-number of chunks of information” rule and the colour is really, really glaring on the eye.
The important thing is that your site is functional. Just a suggestion: It may be possible to squeeze everything into one single page. And maybe updating to a more posh and modern look may bring in more customers.
Just a suggestion…
elfkin
As far as that time calculator, did you ask me about that because it’s something obscure, cryptic and arcane - basically something I’d probably know about?
Well, funny you should ask. One of the best sites on the 'Net (and I have nothing to do with this site - except using it) is www.timeanddate.com
I found one of their calculators that does this:
Time Duration Calculator: Time between two dates/times
You can either leave the time fields blank OR click on their no time option.
As a test I entered Dec 28, 2002 through August 6, 2005 and the answer is 2 years 7 months 9 days (excluding the end date).
Yep, I think this is what you want.
While you are there, you can check out what time it is in Guam too.
Now that I think of it, fishbicycle could also use that exact same page. The only difference would be to leave the date fields blank.
I don’t think the background texture is that bad, except that it hugely clashes with the red and yellow. The blue, and even the purple, looks okay with that background.
That’s probably the site’s biggest sin. If it were me (IANA website designer, although I used to play one on the www), I’d move the listing of hits to the bottom below the ToS link, shrink the “search” to one line (“Search this site” followed by a textbox and then a small “enter” button), and move the Calculator Link Graph up, adjusting it as needed so the whole list can be seen without scrolling down. Maybe put some kind of short tagline under the “1728 Software Systems” for people like me who stare at the site for a minute before we figure out what it’s for.
And get rid of the red and yellow. Keep the blue.
Check here, here or here. No biggie, just try to remember in the future.
Well, you do have a link to (a page on) your website in your signature! True, it’s actually to the “Official Doper Bratpack” 
and I don’t remember seeing you include it in your posts, but it must still mean that you’re trying to plug it, right? Right? 
Yeah, we don’t have enough Dubya bashings here! Seriously, in many cases, I’m sure that your website can be a good link – many people here who have used it seem to like it a lot – but as I said, try to make sure that it’s pertinent (what I mean is, link to it when it adds something to what has been said and linked to in the thread up to that point), and don’t forget to mention that it’s your site.
severus
Well I see you tracked some of those postings down. I either forgot or was just being lazy, because, as you well know (er … as everybody knows), I am not shy about stating whose website that is. Yes, the link to the bratpack webpage (part of my website) is in my signature line but as you noticed, it’s very rare that I use a sig line.
As far as Dubya-bashing, well since the last time you were here, I made a posting to a thread about grammar:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=335279&page=2
(See posting #56) Geez, if you can’t bash Dubya for his misuse of the English language, your grammar skills are seriously lacking. (and heck, it was from the speech he made just last night).
wolfmeister A person’s instantaneous, visceral reaction is usually the most honest… (you know, like when you meet somebody you havent seen for years, and think "wow–she’s fat )
So here’s my reaction to your site:
I clicked your link, and was really startled. I thought to myself–WOW–this is that site that I found so useful about 6 months ago when I needed some conversion factors–and, man, *did it suck!!! * ( Not the content, which was very, very useful.)
But the format is not what it outta be .The first screen leaves you thinking that you’ve clicked on the wrong site, or maybe it’s a popup window that you forgot to close.
After 6 months or more of not using it, your web site was instantaneously recognizable to me–but not for the right reasons.
I maintain a teaching website and specifically refrain from high-end design features. The purpose of the web-page is to serve as a big, ugly file cabinet in the sky for myself and my students. I am certain that its’ design, ermm, is lacking in many ways. The source code certainly blows, since much of the paging content is “saved as webpage” by the doodahs at MS Office . I could, but lack the time to hand render html code in NotePad or WordPad to get clean, elegant pages.
There is a point to teaching good style in web design, and to a large degree the critic(s) at TWPS draw attention to design variations that sometimes work against the purpose(s) of the targeted websites.