Submitter’s comments: Recently I had a web design class assignment where we had to find an example of a bad site and then say why we thought it was bad. The site I used was www.michrenfest.com. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I had to analyze it. Their images are not optimized, they have two different page layouts (one with a large background image & image map for navigation and another with a large background image and Flash navigation), barely readable text on a couple of the pages, the artisans page is pretty much useless as it doesn’t give any information beyond the name of vendors are just some of the things I found.
The worst parts of the site though were the use of background images and the Flash navigation. In one page case, the background image was over 1.5MB in size! The Flash navigation was bad in that it gives two types of site navigation which are inconsistent with each other and using my browser (IE 6) with some security set, the Flash components had to be first clicked on for activation before the navigation button would work. In essence, click twice to get to a page.
Vincent’s comments: Ah, IE 6 with security set. It screws up the web page no end. At least these folks were smart enough to have a text link. Unfortunately, the rest of the site seems to be nothing more than one gif image per page. It’s the brochureware look of 1996.
Technorati tags: webdesign | usability | webdev | accessibility | web graphics | website design | web standards | Accessibility