This topic is dedicated to the insanely greedy website owners who just can't seem to find enough advertisements to totally destroy their sites.
I thought I'd start this because Wladimir and I were having a little fun today looking at some really bad sites. If these site owners like reading in these forums, then let them have a look through some of these design fiascoes. Talk about driving your audience away!
This will give you a chance to see what you are missing
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I'll start with my all-time favorite: http://www.ladysmithchronicle.com
... just turn off your blockers, select a news story and take a look at this carefully-crafted work of art. There was more work put into the ad arrangements than the actually site content. Good job guys .... beautifully done & every ad is animated too. Oh yeah ... thanx for the 2 paragraphs of text in all that.
"Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it"
Another favorite is the government-run Indian Railways system ... one of India's busiest websites for checking routes & getting train tickets.
I've seen casino sites that don't look this bad. If you have the nerve to navigate the rest of the site, you probably won't see many more ads. What you WILL see is plenty of "under construction' links or pages that have absolutely no flow with the rest of the site: http://irctc.co.in/
Last edited by rick752 on Fri Mar 23, 2007 3:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it"
There are plenty of ridiculous examples among the mainstream sites.
eweek, techrepublic, and the various ziff davis sites, they show a 'table of contents' page, get you to clickhru to a 'category' TOC page...
then, when you click to read an article, you get one stinkin' paragraph and 3-4Mb of advertising images/scripts. I've even seen sites 'stringing out' daily news (press releases) so that each item spans 4-6 "pages".
how about lock this topic and you just invite people to PM you with 'worst site nominees'
hella way for people to drive traffic is to post to this thread so we'll all take the bait. Yay, I just got tricked into visiting that gay people site linked above.
Personally, it's ok if traffic is driven there over the short term to these "hall of shame" sites. Do you think the advertisers will be happy because traffic is being driven there based on the fact that the only reason the site had a "spike" was because people wanted to see how much the site's ads sucked? ... that ought to get a lot of 'click throughs' hey?
The reason for this post is to make users (and the site owners themselves) aware of how ridiculous and annoying the over-advertising is on these sites. Insane ads everywhere and links disguised as the site's own pages that only go to third-party advertisers just show users the reason why they shown AVOID THESE SITES ALTOGETHER ... these sites are only being deceptive and greedy! Never trust a site that tries to deceive you!
Almost any of the content on these sites can also be found elsewhere on much more 'civil' sites. If their links aren't even theirs, chances are the content isn't either or isn't worth reading. Sites like that are like watching a really old "C" movie on TV ... and then having to watch 5 minute commercial breaks every 10 minutes .... how do you justify that?
"Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it"
33 blocked items there and it still needs more .... nice third-party links too (half theirs ... half advertisers). If you could strip away everything, you would end up with a small article with a hundred links. Like I said, half theirs ... half advertisers. Oh yeah .. let's not forget the 2 or 3 giant, annoying flash ads thrown in there for good measure.
But the best part there is that their own logo is served by a 3rd-party ad company (I kind of like the idea of leaving it blocked) ... why would you bother visiting this site?
"Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it"
