I’m amazed that Vincent Flanders is still doing web pages that suck. He had some good principals back in the day and taught me a hell of a lot. But with the sands of time, I thought that would’ve died out. Perhaps Web 2.0 has increased his business tenfold. Anyway for those of you that came in late, he highlighted sites that suck to emphasis design principals that do work. A very healthy thing to do and often quite funny.

For the first time in a long time I’ve been inspired by web design that truly sucks - yes in this day and age. BEA Weblogic are meant to be leaders in portal technology, but not according to this BEA I define demo. It’s totally in Adobe Flash and is designed so that everything is one click - and about ten seconds - away. Why? Because they’re trying to be cool. You click something and doors spin around and a mock movie screen loads up.

This spinning door thing is made especially sucky because the spinning doors are really high resolution. So they don’t spin right. They’re really clunky unless you have a gazillion gigs or RAM and as many processors on your machine, making it look especially stupid. The person who was trying to look cool forgot the premise ‘I am here to download a document. Just give me the document’. Until BEA, this stuff had died off in the nineties.

So here they are pitching a very expensive product to a highly qualified audience and it’s like they’re trying sell ice to eskimos with an elaborate presentation. Nothing could impress me less. Basically you’re saying you have a superior web portal technology, but you wouldn’t know content from Adam. It’s tantamount to Gianni Versace wearing a wife beater singlet and trackie daks telling you he’s the ultimate fashionista.

If there was one thing that really made me think of Flanders though, it was the ‘mystery meat’ navigation. Just like getting in a car, you want to know what’s going to happen when you turn the key. You expect the engine to blurt into life and start idling quietly. Think about it. You want the same predictability from a web link. You want to know what’s going to open (a movie, a document, a web page) and where (a new window, a layer). For the life of me, this slick preso gave you no idea what was going to pop up - and generally the content wasn’t worth the wait. Mystery meat indeed - and that’s really hard to do these days.

Motto of the story, whether it’s the designer or the client, if you’re trying to act cool, it’s probably because you’re not. So get your message out there quickly and professionally and leave the cool to the Fonz. ESPECIALLY if you have very little content. Here’s the presentation link again.