Bad web design

I am so tired of bad web design. My biggest pet peeve is when a web site has a workflow diagram with a little word under each picture describing the item – but you can’t click on the picture, only on the word!
It’s even worse when the word is small. A similar problem is when you are supposed to click on some teeny tiny icon to open a link. You can barely get your cursor on that icon. Here is a table of information and you click on an item to get more information. But instead of having a link from the description, you must click on the small number!
Another common web design problem is the difficulty of finding relevant information. Most visitors to certain types of web sites are often in search of 2-3 pieces of information. For example, most visitors to a school web site are probably looking for the school calendar (or lunch calendar), the attendance line (to call when your child is sick) or office phone number, or school closings. All this information should appear on the school’s main web page and you should be able to see it without scrolling. There shouldn’t just be a link to that stuff, the information should appear on that page.

Sometimes web sites have icons instead of words for common links. I think icons are ok when you use the web site a lot, like your blog. A little pencil icon means edit. OK, I get it. But if someone only visits a web site occasionally, what does a little book icon mean? Address book? Read a book? Who knows. Web sites with infrequent visitors should abandon icons or at least combine them with text.

Even worse are bad fonts. I’ve seen some pretty unreadable fonts. Here’s an example:

If you like the look of a fancy font, then use it for your header. But a paragraph needs to have a readable font. You also shouldn't assume that every browser supports the fonts that you have. At least take it into consideration when you use a fancy font.

I've seen pages that have no headers or categories - the links are embedded into paragraphs. This style was abandoned about 15 years ago for good reason. It's cute when it's your personal web site but not when it's an information web site. I don't have time to read a paragraph, just list out the relevant links!

Better searches! This is a category in itself, and really applies to big corporate sites as opposed to mom and pop web sites, since they presumably don't have the programming capability to do it right. It's unbelievable that I can go to a hotel web site, type in Madison, and what comes up is a list of damn near every Madison in the US...except Wisconsin...because that is on the SECOND page of results! Come on! Or when there is only one result to your search - but instead of displaying the information, the web site displays a link! Now you must click again to get the information. Argh!

Here's one of my favorites. I'm trying to book a flight. I enter Chicago and Albany. And here's what I get:

This site may be using a soundex search, in case people type a word the way it sounds and misspell it. But that's idiotic when they have spelled the word correctly and there is only one exact match.

Try to display the information in the same page whenever possible. I've been thinking about this lately, and I'm sure that other people have too. I'm tired of opening page after page of subcategories to get information when the site has very little information in the first place.

If you have a personal site, or your site isn’t informational, do whatever you like. But if you have an informational web site, please don’t do these:

• Bad fonts
  
• Hard to find important information
  
• Can't click on images or links are not obvious
  
• Non-descriptive categories
  
• Bad searches
  
• Too many clicks to get to relevant information
  
• No headers, categories, or list of links

My wife is getting tired of hearing me say "This is the WORST web site EVER!"

- schneid