COMM 260, Intro to Web Design and COMM 750, Web Studies/Digital Media
Instructor: Ross Collins

Ross's web site design...

To honor halloween I've slapped together (and it shows) several examples of really bad web site design.

Ideas for these sucky web sites are taken from my own painful experiences, and experiences as painful as described by Jennfier Kyrnin of About.com in her amusing Little Web of Horrors.

Horror Show web site one: black or dark background.

• Super hard to see, unless done just right.
• Looks pretentious at best.
• Costs a ton in ink to print.
• Note also everything is centered: borrrrrring.

Horror Show web site two: black background and dark text as well.

• You think it looks mysteriously cool, but really it looks haplessly amateurish.
• And you thought the last site was hard to read?
• Garish at best.

Horror Show web site three: font-asia!

• If everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.
• Lots of h1s and h2s, capitalized letters and boldface look horsey and amateurish.
• No unity of font.

Horror Show web site four: blinking text.

• Really cool effect in 1997.
• Unreadable, annoying.
• Some browsers even refuse to display it. Perhaps a good thing.

Horror Show web site five: busy backgrounds.

• Generally, photographs don't work well as background tiles.
• Original photo usually unrecognizable.
• I defy you to read this text!

Horror Show web site six: laundry list of links.

• Confusing.
• Boring.
• Tells us nothing about the sites listed.

Horror Show web site seven: icon flatulence!

• Too cute by half.
• A little goes a long way (two cute li'l icons, max.)

Horror Show web site eight: Picture bloat.

• Slow download times.
• Irritating to scroll around photos.
• Shows you don't know !@#$ about web image optimization. (I have lots of these on my site....)

And now for the...

...EEEEEyahhhhhh!

Take me back to COMM 260 Resources or COMM 750 Overview, PLEASE!