Speechless

There are no words that can express, or spare, the tragedy of a bad website.
Sometimes, you can only drop your jaw in horrified wonder and say “dear God, what were they thinking?”

Someone at Arngren.net has never heard the phrase less is more. This page is so bad, it pains me.

Take a look: THE TRAVESTY

There is way too much on this page. The eye doesn’t know where to look. No particular item stands out, and there is no fluid movement across the page. It’s equivalent to condensing a department store catalog to one page with no sections.

The boxes seem randomly placed and do not offer a modular feel to the page, as intended. The lines of the boxes are too thick and begin to draw attention to themselves, not to the items they are boxing. The boxes also jut over onto other items or into the index and aren’t properly sized.

It is also impossible for me to tell which product title goes with which image (and that has nothing to do with language). It is such a jumbled mess. The prices and product names are different sizes, which I don’t like. The red is hard to read, too.

In the middle of this collage of products is what appears to be a group of links, similar to those on the left-hand side. I do not know whose face that is, but it keeps reappearing. It’s silly to have this cartoon face surrounded by real images.

The scrolling is entirely illogical. You have to scroll horizontally and vertically to see the entire web page, but the scroll also goes too far and you get a large expanse of white space on the right side. I don’t understand why the page is too large for its content.

What appears to be a third index in the strangely colored yellow box is adding to the confusion with links. Are these indexes all the same, or are there multiple indexes? And why is there one in the middle of the page? It seems that the left-hand index has all the links and the other indexes only some of the longer list.

The navigation is absolutely terrible. I haven’t got any idea how these items were arranged or what the colors are supposed to mean. Are the products in the colored boxes supposed to draw my eye? Are they special somewhow? The buttons don’t fit in the yellow column, either (the ones that say sign/view my guest book).

If we continue on our horrific tour, we find a lot of flash animation at the bottom of the page. Christmas flash. I’m sorry… Christmas was 4 months ago. I don’t understand. It might have been cheery in December, but now it’s just evidence that the web page isn’t routinely updated. The waving Santa is now off-putting, rather than jolly. Holidays are not year-round. Also, the holly by the site name (which should be larger) is competing with the flash helicopter. What do these two things have in common, besides starting with h? Oh yeah, nothing.

And wow, to top it all, there is an inappropriate flash on this page! This site appeared to be a technologically oriented business page, but now, there are playboy models. I don’t see the connection. This must not be a family company.

Speaking of, what is this business anyways? I see no link related to what this company is about, what it’s selling, or how to contact the staff. Who even works there? Anyone? Is it a scam?

All they have going for them is the nice search bar capability. Too bad typing in a product name leads you to a drab, blue and white page of links. Confusing? Yes. Obnoxious? If you want to look at multiple objects at a time, yes. You’d have to pull up three or four windows. However, this page is more organized than the homepage and a nice break on the eyes.

Arngren, I worry about your future…

Suggestion? Gut the whole thing and start over.