The Top Ten Signs Your Web Page Sucks. . .
From Web-Design & Review in 2010, updated in 2015
I first began teaching web design in 1993 as a series of national seminars in 22 cities a year. It was thrilling because nobody knew much about this new media. I just adapted my then famous "Ten Deadly Sins of Desktop Publishing" to the "Ten Deadly Sins of Web Design" . . . but then Vincent Flanders came out with "Web Pages that Suck"* and I adopted that for my seminars . . . giving away his book(s) to attendees.
About that same time, Lynda Weinman came out with her web design book and augmented it with a listserv "WebDesign" -- we all loved and followed. In 1997, Lynda shut the list down and WebDesign-Review.com picked it up and carried on. For several years that listserv had a quarter million readers and several hundred posts a day. Around the turn of the century we ran a survey of those readers, and just under 6,000 of those readers ranked their
Top Ten Signs Your Web Page Sucks:
#10 : Requiring extra software for the site to work
#9 : Confusing, hard to follow layout
#8 : Page's fixed, too wide, off right of screen
#7 : Required to register to read
#6 : Slow-loading pages or graphics (7 seconds rule)
#5 : Confusing navigation
#4 : Too many clicks or dead links
#3 : Difficult to read text (tiny, color, background, etc.)
#2 : Something moves (blinking, jumping, shaking)
. . . and the number ONE most hated web feature:
#1 : Obnoxious, rude, unwanted Advertising (pop-up, floating or in-content)
Did anyone learn the lessons of good design?
These days, it's a true mess. Google has become the self-proclaimed web design minister, people are perpetually parked online, umbilicaled to their mobile device, everything is monetized and everything moves. To make things worse, organized crime and evil third-worlders have discovered the web's weaknesses can be directly, freely and instantly converted into a cash cow. Now web sites can carry virus, malware and serious cybercrime coding, tracking, stalking -- they can be forged or spoofed versions of real sites, and can steal your money, your identity and your business. Unlike pure html, the geeks came up with an unimaginable epidemic of tricks to make things work -- but don't. Mark-up code is injected with a dazzling array of encoding all designed to hide and mask its unknown agenda and usually breaks right when you need the content the most. Well-intended new gizmos like Flash have become the tools of organized crime and gangster governments.
Driven by an unquenchable lust for money, today's web epitomizes the list of reasons why web pages suck!
The advertising industry, aided by sophisticated programmers and marketing predators is continueally developing new ways to increase their standards of rudeness. Theres an expanding war to see who can be the most intrusive to their readers. Content is no longer as important as achieving the most number of impressions and clicks as is humanly possible before letting you get on with your business. Yes, you can imagine how the signs your web page SUCKS may have changed -- yet have stayed the same.
Update for 2025 :
If you spend an hour on the web, you can clearly see, all the predictions of our early web designers have come true! The original ideals of the Internet and World Wide Web are gone, now replaced by the Television mentality of big business. It's no longer a "level playing field" ... the cartels own all of it. Only the Black Web survives. Today,
Web pages are designed by robots, CMS systems
CMS systems provide automated updates and management
There's no design -- it's now driven by formulas or "UX"
Money is EVERYTHING: it's all about money!
Madison Avenue has fully corrupted the internet
Ads appear everywhere, like hookers at a cowboy rodeo
Clickbait has become the acceptable means of getting readers
Content creators have no problem blocking their content for money
False advertising is fully accepted by the Ad cartels.
False advertising, phishing, ransomeware has infiltrated social media
The most influential web sites are controlled by the deep state, or Madison Avenue
So now I take you to the conversation on LinkedIN where well known early web designers discuss what happened, and what will happen to web design. Remember, we look forward to your comments at
Today DT&G is on Facebook
... and thanks for reading
GO: YOU KNOW THAT WEB PAGE SUCKS IF ..