The Important Lessons We Can Learn From The Worst Websites On The Internet

• By Sarah
• General News
• 1807 Views
• 21st March 2022

The World Wide Web is relatively new and constantly evolving, and because of this, there are lessons to learn nearly everywhere from both the most well-designed websites and white label development efforts and from those that are less well-made.

The writer and philosopher Voltaire once noted that in “all times… the bad abounds and the good is rare” and web design is no exception to this rule.

In most cases, it must be noted, bad web design is the product of age, changing standards, incompatibility and a reliance on old technological solutions that have since been discontinued, and whilst these are important lessons to know, the websites showcased in this list have more fundamental issues.

Here are some of the worst websites ever unironically published on the World Wide Web and the most important lessons designers, businesses and content creators alike can learn from them.

 

Arngren

The Norwegian mail-order catalogue company Arngren’s abhorrent website is on the borderline of irony, because whilst the website was not initially designed to deliberately be an ugly, cluttered, uneven and borderline unreadable mess, they have since leaned into the infamous negative reception.

In an attempt to be diplomatic, it appears as if they have designed their home page to resemble a catalogue of sorts; it is filled with a range of pictures of all the products you could possibly want or need with the logic that one of them will catch your eye and make you enquire further.

The key lesson to learn here is that less is very much more; prioritise your hot ticket items, use an e-commerce platform to make creating consistent product pages easier and streamline your design as much as possible to avoid both visitors and their web browsers suffering from overload.

 

Patimex

Weirdly enough, this Polish BBQ company’s actual website is not too bad, featuring some great imagery, a relatively simple design and the ability to scale for mobile and vertical monitors.

However, the Patimex website found on their own dot com domain was truly surreal. It relies entirely on Adobe Flash, meaning that it no longer actually works, but if you get around this, it hits you with a baffling assortment of imagery, awful cartoons and very loud, obnoxious music.

Websites like this are one of the reasons why allowing a website to autoplay video or music is typically a bad idea these days.

 

Gates N Fences

It is difficult to know exactly where to start with the issues the Florida-based gate company has with its website, but even taking into account that the last time the site’s layout was updated was nearly 15 years ago, it still looks considerably outdated.

Featuring an inconsistent, oversized sidebar, three sets of text columns that make the website very hard to read on mobile, images that are small and randomly placed, far too much text that also manages to be inconsistent and often grammatically incorrect, Gates N Fences is somewhat off-putting.

It requires a complete redesign but if there is a single lesson to learn it is the importance of the user experience to a website. If a website is difficult to navigate or intimidating in its use of text, people will simply click away.