How Not to Build a Website.
So, you’re looking at building a brand-new website for your personal or business use. Perhaps you’re thinking of a sleek, modern design with impressive animations and graphics to wow your audience. Maybe you’d prefer something simple and effective to clearly communicate your brand message to your visitors.
At Learning 247, we have a range of courses that can teach you how to build a website for yourself. You can find these here. However, in this blog post, we’re going to take you through a list of websites that perfectly demonstrate how NOT to build a website.
1) Yale School of Art
https://www.art.yale.edu/
The website for the Yale School of Art is anything but a masterpiece! The intention behind the website is, presumably, to leave a bold impression on the visitor. However, with the website’s clashing colours, disjointed layout and unclear structure, the user is just left feeling confused. As well as this, it makes the user doubt that they are visiting the correct website at all, as you would expect an Ivy League University website would be better designed.
2) ARNGREN.net
https://arngren.net/
Be warned before you visit this website as it is a truly headache-inducing experience. The website is completely cluttered and has no navigational structure. The user is disoriented as soon as they enter the site by the seemingly random placement of images, brightly coloured, overlapping text and overstimulating design. Overall, the website is impossible to use, and the pricing of the items are also unclear. We certainly won’t be buying anything from this site!
3) Craigslist
Whereas the above website has an overwhelming number of images, Craigslist has the complete opposite problem. The site seems to be devoid of all colour and personality. When you enter the website, you are confronted by a wall of blue text with no engaging images or graphics. There is little contrast between the headings and lists on the page, which makes the site difficult to navigate. The website’s design hasn’t been updated since 1996, and we think it’s in desperate need of a makeover!
4) LEDbow
https://ledbow.cz/
At a first glance, this website doesn’t look as terrible as some of the other offenders included in this list. The layout of the site looks easy enough to navigate, and the design is modern and eye-catching. However, once you actually visit the website and start to click around, almost every element includes some form of animation or sound. As a result, there are loading screens before every page, and the animations are distracting. On top of this, many of the links on the site are broken or require multiple clicks to work.
5) Centre for Advanced Visual Studies
http://act.mit.edu/cavs/
This is another example of an art school with a website that has good intentions, but ultimately fails to create a good user experience. The website is just one continuous page of huge text and images. As you scroll down the page (which seems to go on forever!) the text begins to slant to one side, making it difficult to read. The artwork itself is displayed in a rotating wheel fashion with headings that, when clicked, suddenly take you in a different direction - with no other way to navigate the site.
6) The World’s Worst Website Ever
https://www.theworldsworstwebsiteever.com/
Okay, so this final website is bad on purpose. But if you’re looking for an excellent example of how not to build a website, this is probably the best (or in this case, worst) you’re going to get. The repeated background combined with the disarray of different fonts, garish colours, and random animations is enough to make you dizzy. The chaotic layout also contributes to what makes this website so hilariously terrible that we’re almost impressed!
We hope you found this list of bad websites insightful and entertaining. If you do want to learn how to design and build a great website, take a look at our range of Web Design and Programming and Coding courses.