Bad Designs
There are several website design mistakes that are still unfortunately common today. The ones that really bother me are:
1. Unnecessary javascript that's incompatible with Firefox or Mac web browsers and makes the website unusable with them. The incompatible javascript is usually for some sort of fancy, eye candy effect like fading in images as the page displays, floating eyeballs, or something else just as useless.
Example: The Friends of Saguaro plant pages which have images that don't appear on non-Internet Explorer browsers due to an incompatible javascript.
2. Online stores that display no prices on their merchandise, or you have to add the item to the shopping cart in order to see the price. When I encounter this, I look elsewhere to buy because I naturally assume that any business that does this doesn't want people comparing their prices with those of other online stores because their prices are way too high.
Example: Circuit City is guilty of this, and I have never purchased anything from them online. I have no idea what their actual prices are like.
3. Java page navigation applets which take forever to load and can crash your browser if you cancel loading them halfway through. I try to avoid revisiting these java-infected websites, but I keep discovering new ones.
Example: Glendale Xeriscape Botanical Garden unnecessarily uses a java applet for navigation, and this one caused Firefox to unexpectedly quit when I lost patience waiting for it to load and closed the page.
4. Super low-quality jpeg images, or even worse (shudder), photographs saved as gifs. Gifs can only have 256 colors, so saving a photograph of a lovely flower as a gif file turns the poor flower into a weird looking, speckled mutant.
Example: RimJournal uses gifs for their flower photos which makes the flowers look quite ugly and granular.
Obviously, bad design choices are not limited to websites. Some very strange ones can be found in the homes of new, avant guard architects who choose bizarre form over any real function. My parents looked at one architect's house here in Tucson that had an awkward, triangular floor plan, a lack of interior doors, and very strange bathrooms with pecky cedar-lined showers. Pecky cedar is incense cedar wood pitted with numerous holes eaten away by a fungus. How would anyone clean soap scum off of pecky cedar?
Houses designed by "form over function" architects can be awful, but what If some Software Developers built houses? I'm still discovering new things in software programs that I've used for years. It's amazing how many application features remain undiscovered and unused simply due to bad design, and I'm even a snoopy sort of person who looks around in the menus and is not afraid to click unlabeled buttons (a.k.a. mystery meat navigation).
Web Pages That Suck lists common website design mistakes and the author has a whole section on mystery meat navigation.
For design horrors of the past, check out the interior designs at Eurobad '74 and the awful men's clothing at James Lilek's The Dorcus Line of Menswear.
Photos of numerous bad designs can also be found at Bad Designs. The "mop sink" is hilariously bad, and I feel sorry for the janitor that has to use it.
