Poorly Designed Websites
There's a great book entitled Web Pages That Suck that showcases by example things that web developers should not do. I often encounter sites that would be right at home in that book and decided to start my own list.
The Friedman Marketing Group
Nice visual design totally destroyed with tacky unnecessary sounds. Make sure your sound is on and move your mouse over the links at the top and take a step back in time as you feel like you're playing a video games from the 80's. Click on a few pages and see how quickly you tire of the little electronica musical intro. And good luck navigating if you have Javascript disabled (hint - you can't.)
The Columbia, SC Presentation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
I see this faux pas all too often; web developers make giant graphics fit on their page using height and width attributes instead of properly shrinking the image using image manipulation software (such as the excellent free Irfanview); otherwise, the image takes forever to load, it contributes significantly to the site's bandwidth usage, and often the resulting image is of poor quality. This page is especially guilty of this, displaying an 18.5MP (3299 x 5650 pixels) image at a mere 0.25MP (396 x 678 pixels); this sucker is a whopping 2.6MB in size, whereas a properly resized version would easily be less than 50kB (a 98% reduction in file size.) Even worse is the fact that the graphic is simply text, so the use of an image is totally unnecesaary. View a screenshot to see the location on the page of the guilty image.
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