The Worst Website Designs of All Time

A good website design will reflect your brand while highlighting your products and services and encouraging visitors to explore additional content. In an increasingly digital marketplace a good site can be the thing that separates you from your competition. 

Elegantthemes.com, a site that offers WordPress templates and designs, summarized several of the worst designs of all time. The first featured site is Blinkee.com which sells things that glow in the dark. 

Blinkee.com is a blast from the past with outdated design themes and overwhelming animation via blinking icons for all its products. The site is too busy for consumers and the size of images and icons are not good for navigation. 

Another featured site is Suzannecollinsbooks.com. Poor navigation and missed opportunities plague the website of Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games series. 

For authors and anyone hoping to sell a product online, your site should always have embedded links for purchasing your products. The images and links on Suzanne’s site sparsely populate white space and do not take you a links for buying her books, says Elegantthemes.com. 

Pennyjuice.com, a site that sells fruit juice for day cars and childcare centers, also made the list for bad design. After first choosing the version of the site you want (HTML or Flash), you are greeted by outdated copyrights and old design themes — two things that are red flags for visitors who may think your product or services are as out of date as your site. 

Entreprenuer.com, an online source that provides small businesses and owners with information and resources for developing entrepreneurial skills and improving business growth, says the worst things a designer or owner can do to his or site relate to poor navigation, a lack of up to date and relevant information and overusing color. 

Bad website design includes “disabling the back button, opening new windows, failing to provide contact information in several easy-to-find locations,  broken links, slow server times, outdated information, orphan pages and failing to link a website with social networking sites,” says Entrepreneur.com. 

One of the two most heavily cited failures include poor navigation and overuse of varying fonts and colors. Entrepreneur says, “There should be a navigation bar on every page that guides visitors to other areas of the site. Position the bar along the top of the page or along the left side so it will always be visible regardless of screen resolution.”

With regard to colors and fonts the site also says, “Use two or three fonts and colors per page, maximum. The idea is to reassure viewers of your solidity and stability, not to convince them you're wildly artistic.”

Nicole Donaldson writes for Fusion 360, an SEO and content marketing agency. She writes for many other clients as well. Follow on Twitter.