When Bad Web Design Is Good
Posted on | January 8, 2010 | 8 Comments
You don’t have to be an expert to recognize bad web design. Blaring colors, confusing navigation, 5 pounds of stuff packed into a 3 pound bag… You’d think that the basics are common sense. Alas, sometimes common sense isn’t so common.
This was particularly evident after a recent encounter with a heinous-looking website which stirred my interest in searching out some really bad websites. Driven by a touch of curiosity and the desire for a bit of entertainment, I found a couple sites that delivered the goods:
Web Pages That Suck – This is my favorite, because I have some history with it. Back in the day (circa ’97) when I was teaching myself HTML, I used the sites found on this site as examples of what not to do. Ironically, the site itself is not all that pretty, but it’s a fave since the webmaster Vincent Flanders explains what he feels is wrong and why.
Website FAIL – 30 Web Designs that Will Hurt Your Eyes – Get into your time machine to revisit the electric color schemes of days gone by. At first I thought that these were just dead sites from the late ‘90s, but I was wrong. The eSupersoft website is particularly entertaining, in a robotic kind of way.
20 of the Worst Designed Websites in the World -What can I say, the name says it all. I enjoyed the commentary, but had to ask if it was mean. Then I remembered that it was all in fun and enjoyed the rest of the post. It looks like LingsCars.com is at least an honorable mention of most posts that I ran into, including this one.
Sure, looking at a few of these is enough to evoke the gag reflex, but it can be really helpful in understanding good web design. While the incessant blinking animations, complicated layouts and “mystery meat” navigation may be over the top, it does help most understand the basics of what should be avoided.
What do you think? Can bad design have a good outcome?
Bill Rowland
Keywords: web design, web pages that suck, bad web design
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8 Responses to “When Bad Web Design Is Good”
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January 10th, 2010 @ 6:11 am
Yes, poor design can have a good outcome!Ttake for example : you are building a website and you are trying to sell weight loss pills by telling the visitor a story about how you were able to lose fat , if you have a poor design the visitor will think you are a normal person (like him) and will gain trust in you.
January 10th, 2010 @ 4:05 pm
No, it’s not mean… That guy Flanders is simply a bit anal. Some of the “rules” he quotes are just miserable. Like sticking to 2 font sizes. How boring. The dummy in his mouth says it all.
You can make a web page how the hell you want and not follow the sheep. Web page design is generally completely retarded IMHO. If the same “rules” applied to TV, then every TV programme worth it’s salt would “suck”. You would have static, dull, boring, consistently miserable TV programmes. Nothing should move, flash or have any action according to that misery Flanders.
If you pay attention to these “rules” of “good design”, I will happily post you razor blades to complete your online activity as you may as well slash your wrists.
Wish more people would be more adventurous.
Ling
LINGsCARS
January 12th, 2010 @ 10:52 am
About 10 years ago I had a bit of a wake-up call when i started working with a company who had a series of websites that you could probably describe from a design perspective as “bad”. However, they were outperforming all their competitors on search and as result, had become very popular destinations and were making a good amount of money. This opened my eyes to the fact that the actual design didn’t matter as much as I thought and showed me the power of search engines. These days I like to marry the two but depending on what you are designing your site about, performance is incredibly important. Hey, infomercials are pretty bad but they work!
January 13th, 2010 @ 6:37 pm
Paul,
Good point. At the end of the day, it’s all about whether the website performs well. It may be fun to point toward Vincent Flanders’ “Daily Sucker,” but if it’s getting the job done, who cares?
January 25th, 2010 @ 1:40 am
ya, as stoica told some times bad design can have good outcome.. But it works for some sites not for all sites.
January 29th, 2010 @ 7:18 pm
Bad design is great for “Made For Adsense” sites, but in almost all other cases its BAAAD. Although, I will say that we’ve “improved” a couple of sites for clients that had odd niche markets, and their conversions fell off badly for a while. Why that is, I’ll never fully understand, but my first guess is that they must have had a ton of repeat customers that just got thrown off by the new look and feel, even though it was MUCH IMPROVED. The other thought is that they possibly got more traffic due to the more SEO friendly navigation and overall coding, and as always some of that new traffic wasn’t as targeted.
February 1st, 2010 @ 9:00 am
Ted, thanks for sharing your experience with “bad” web design.
The short term fall off in conversions is a good reminder that SEO/Design changes can provide unexpected results. What I’d like to know is whether the conversion rate eventually returned and then exceeded the original.
February 2nd, 2010 @ 8:05 am
As an Auckland based web designer I rather sheepishly admit to creating this building inspection company website about four years ago.
I used Xsite-Pro as my html editing platform and did the best I could as a complete amateur at the time.
Ironically, it was my love for “all things search engine optimized” that breathed so much life into this otherwise rather bland website.
I optimized the living hell out this site (on-page) and even without undertaking a single linking campaign until recently, the site quickly shot to the top of Google for at least 30 keywords!
So yes, I also agree… a “bad” website can definitely provide unexpectedly good results.