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