Your website sucks

I'm in the process of redesigning a commercial website written 14 years ago. It's a nightmare of nested tables, Javascript, a comma-delimited file, and holy crap! look at all those <font> tags! Obviously CSS and XML were never even considered. But it works.

Of course the author of this monstrosity was me. Not to make excuses, but at the time I really didn't know any better.

After the last couple of days of this I spent 2+ hours tonight looking for the best online price I could find for a certain automobile part. I probably visited 30-40 sites and saw quite a wide variety of approaches to getting and sorting the data I needed and providing a way to order and pay for the part I need. Let's just say there are some remarkably bad ideas out there. Things that make me laugh/cry:

- Allowing credit card info to be entered through an unsecured page. I have seen this more than once just in the last few days.
- Displaying full-size images RESIZED AS THUMBNAILS. You can see them slowly draw on the screen. A thumbnail is just a smaller version of the image, right?
- An actual thumbnail image: "Click to enlarge" and the popup gives you THE EXACT SAME THUMBNAIL or an image roughly 5 pixels larger.
- One particular site asked for year, make & model of my car then the category of parts then provided just a list of 16 manufacturers. :confused: You had to click on each individual logo to get a list of parts from that manufacturer only. And of course most of them show a blank page with "NO ITEMS FOUND."
- No photo or little/no information about the part. Why should I give you my money if you can't even bother to show me the goods?
- Poor grammar/spelling/punctuation. I'm a product of one of the worst public school systems in the free world and even I know the proper use of a friggin' apostrophe!
- "Webmasters" who only know enough HTML to be very dangerous. Somebody needs to tell these people that animated GIFs went out of style in 1998 or so.

Now I know that having a slick, professional website is by no means a proper indication of a company worth doing business with or not. But these days it seems having a disorganized, amateurish or unprofessional website is worse than having no website at all.

I wonder how many of them you could have snuck a SQL injection attack into?

I found the same thing recently when I went looking for a bumper reflector. What amazed me was how many wouldn't even let me search on a product description, only a part number. Even the manufacturers web sites are rubbish.

I guess Car Parts suppliers, in particular, target the trade rather than the domestic market so a poorly navigated web sire may not be as big a deal to them.