Angry Web Designer

The Bad

The Ugliest Popular websites

Being ugly doesn’t mean your not popular, at least when referring to websites. I have comprised a list of ugly yet popular websites on the net. Whilst looking at these sites see if you can see where they went wrong, then you can avoid the same mistakes. Just a note, I hate the phrase Web 2.0 which I will explain later but I have had to use it because it describes what I mean better.

News.com.au

This site has just had a recent revamp. For a news site its kind of ok, they are hanging onto some type of print column style layout. But the site design is poorly executed and just doesn’t satisfy the eye. The ugliest part in my mind is the headings for the different sortable content areas, doesn’t fit with the site at all. The functionality of the site is pretty poor and is quite mixed, the dragging areas are a little flawed on non-IE browsers.

GoDaddy.com

Its just pure ugly. Nothing else to describe how bad and cliche Web 2.0 they were trying to be when they designed the site. It has absolutely no thought into User Experience or ease-of-use. It’s just one of the worst sites that one of the largest registrars could have.

The worst part is the right hand sidebar that has that stupid and very poorly executed gradient in it. Web 2.0 is about to die and GoDaddy’s site will have a shelf life of less than 6 months. I found their previous site better, even though it was pretty bad.

Ikea.com.au

Love the products but I hate their Australian site. It’s very crude and not very nice for a company that’s Sweedish when it should be clean, crisp and creative. Navigation and user experience on the site is really just a pain and it will eventually lead you to a dead-end or a server error page.

Revision3.com

Just like IKEA, love the content/product but hate the site. It comes under the failed Web 2.0 redesign attempts. I find the overall design very mixed. The use of gradients and shadows hasn’t been executed well. The background colours is just a mono-tone black with no highlights or interest in it whatsoever. The use of varying components like the scrolling programs listing makes the layout very patchy.

The Rev3 site is one of the sites I want to be able to design myself. I know I could produce a more workable result for them but living in Australia makes me very unaccessible to them, unless they want to fix that I’m sure you may have the same feelings about the site, its ok but it could be better.

Facebook.com

This is a very gray-area ugly site. It’s general design is ok but the new “improvements” are a complete mess. I have gone into detail with these issues in another blog post called “Facebook, Give it a rest already!“.

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