Ineffective Websites

Ineffective websites usually suffer from a couple of the 10 website design problems. The website design problems that I cannot abide by are busy color schemes (because they are distracting) and posts that look like advertising.

Hashtag Feminism

I'm a big reader of feminist blogs and websites. In my active pursuit of new things to read, I have found a couple of sites that are suffering from poor design. For example: www.hashtagfeminism.com. This is a blog devoted to feminism from "others" voices using hashtags to create topics, which is a great idea with so much potential! However, the creator of this blog has broken the ultimate design rule: Never have white text on a black background. It is difficult to read and distracting.

Hashtag Femism also has posts that look like advertisements. I think some of that is because the blog is on a black background, and a lot of the images are also on black backgrounds, so the spacing is erratic. Also, the section on the right of the page is all streaming content from social media, which is a good idea, but the interface makes it look busy. There is simply too much information on that side.

Africa Calling

I work in communications for a maternal health initiative, and I'm constantly exposed to poor designs for non-profit companies that don't have much to spend on a website. They don't know seem to know that simple is better! Www.africacalling.ca suffers from a similar problem as Hashtag Feminism in that the background is busy and distracting. There also is no search function, which is a huge mistake for all websites. People tend to want to search rather than browse when they are online. Any site without a search function is missing out on substantial traffic. 

Do you have any examples of bad websites? What would you do to make them better?

Prompt for blog (5): Find two examples of ineffective websites. What makes these sites ineffective?