Throughout anyone's experience on the Internet, they're bound to find some websites that they like and dislike. Often we don't really give much thought to them, we click and move on. And sometimes you'll stumble across an example of an abysmal combination of design choices so bad it will stain your mind for a long, long time.
I've kinda kept a mental list of the all the websites I like and don't like over the years, and here's some of them.
(I guess there's more good than bad here because I'm not that well versed in design yet so I tend to only remember the really bad examples.)
Here's some bad ones:
http://www.deviantart.com/
This is an unlikely choice, because it's quite popular. Deviantart is an art website aimed at mostly young amateur artists. It's here because it basically is behind the times in terms of design. This is quite surprising, considering it's supposed to be a website about ART, for crying out loud. Ironically, it's a reflection of the quality of most the work that is submitted to the site. Boring and mostly derivative. Of course, there is good art here...but you have to look hard for it. Anyway, they definitely need to update it.
http://www.stirlingprintall.com/home/index
Summary: One giant business card with an animation of a man who seems to be dribbling a basketball with his elbow in the middle of his forearm.
http://templeoftheking.com/murray.html
I don't even know how I managed to stumble across this one.
It is a web designer's hell? I think I'll let this speak for itself.
http://www.enritec.com/
Now I gotta ask, who the hell decided to stick all the office Post Its in zero gravity? Seriously, you have to chase them down via an 'interactive display' and you don't really know which one you're going to get.
Now some of the good ones:
http://www.qotsa.com/
This is the official website for the band Queens of the Stone Age, it's been overhauled to promote their new album and it works fine. From personal observation, I think the biggest goal of web design is to make it easy and enjoyable for someone to navigate your website, and this one does it well.
Also, they had a cool marketing campaign that basically replaced the old website with a single text box on a black background, with no hints on what it was for. Visitors had no idea what to put in there until someone put their email in, and the website changed into an odd intro for their next album.
http://www.nitrome.com/
I might be a little biased here. Nitrome is a flash games website, and I used to spend a fair amount of time playing their games when I was a lot younger. Their website is ok, it's a bit crowded and oversaturated (probably due to their demographic), and they use a few too many ads. The main reason why I like it is because of their content. Every button, heading and background plus other content has been made by their pixel artists who work on the games themselves. They integrate their own characters into the site, and regularly change the 'skins' of the site.
It works well and I like it. So there.
Spotify Web Campaign
This one caught me by surprise, I've used the app for this site but I've never visited the actual website before. This is the advertising page to get you to sign up. I think the main reason why it's here is because of the massive videos that are in the background, they look really nice and I've never seen a website do that before. It's basically happy people listening to music and doing relaxing things with various colour filters, kinda lame but it looks nice. It made this jaded cynic actually sit back and watch some of it.
Look at the time. Better get movin!
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