Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design

by Vincent Flanders, Michael Willis

Describes with humor ways to design, build, and maintain effective Web sites, including criticism of Web sites the authors feel are badly designed

Genres: Business, Reference

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Yahoo! is in a league by itself. Yahoo! is godlike. To me, it is the first, the best, the most important directory and search engine." (p.211) -- upon reading that, a modern reader might chortle something along the lines of "yeah, a god of death, more like".

In late 1990s, Web Pages that Suck was one of the most awesome websites about web design. And, um, it appears to be still around, though the contents have obviously changed a lot since those days. Indeed, one of the problems Vincent Flanders had back then was that he explained some very good points about web design while pointing a finger accusingly, and the next week, the offending site had become a lot less offending. So obviously there was a need to document the concepts in a little bit more permanent form.

And to that end, WPTS book is indeed a good idea. I don't seem to have an exlibris on this book, so I can't remember when exactly I got the book, but I remember reading it in summer 1998 - and even then, it seemed that some of the technological things mentioned in book were getting outdated. The web was moving fast, and obviously a whole lot of the stuff is more than a little bit obsolete. I've been randomly glancing the book ever since; I decided to just read it from cover to cover today, for fun, to see what sort of blasts from the past I can expect.

As a historic document, it is quite an interesting book even in retrospect: It shows that even in late 1990s, some major companies were still OK with having websites that look pretty atrocious by today's standards. To me, this is a good nostalgic glimpse to the mad, early era of the rising dot-coms -- 1997 was when IT companies were really starting to consider getting a grip and do some serious stuff. And, of course, it still has lessons that were good back then and are good today: it's just common sense these days that web sites should be clear, unobtrusive, consistent, usable and fast. Maybe the only thing that has changed is that the newbie web designers have more good examples of web design around them and aren't immediately doomed to commit hilarious failures.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book does a good job of highlighting specific examples of webpages with poor design and then explaining what is wrong with the design. I do think the examples are more extreme than the real webpages that are seen today with bad design (i.e. blinking text, black background with hard to read fonts/letters). The bad is that the book is quite dated - it was written before Firefox and Chrome and most of the screenshots are from old versions of Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. Perhaps the authors need to write a second/newer edition to this book.

[Russ Painter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool book. It shows really bad things to do to make awful web pages. Then you try to avoid these things.