Earlier we posted some tips on good website design.

In this series I'd like to take you along on a site-seeing tour where we'll look at some truly ugly websites where the badness drives you away.  This is a sort of "What Not To Wear" for your business website.

In this first post of the series we'll look at a really common category of website ugliness:  the home page that's just too busy.  We'll start off with a case of epic homepage failure that's so bad it begs the question, "What were they thinking?"  Some websites look like they probably started off innocently enough, but the badness began to spread and take over like cancer.  Our first example is a contender for the ugliest site on the Internet: 

I give you Haven Works, which proudly proclaims it has been "Nominated for Most Poorly Designed Website in the World by Digg.com!" (if you can find it - it's there, trust me.

Some features of bad design you'll note here: 

• Wall-to-wall coverage.  Not a square inch of screen space wasted here, no, sir!  Everything is covered with text or images.
• Links, links, and more links.  It's actually hard to find text that's not linked on this page.
• Simple navigation - not!  Really exciting to look at, but where does it go?

At least the folks at Haven Works are aware they have an ugly website and have actually capitalized on it.  They've almost pulled off the journey from tacky to kitsch. Because they're a gonzo political website they can get away with this sort of thing, but rare are the businesses that should make the attempt to do so.

Another site with a truly painful amount of "busy" on the front end is the Human Resource and Organizational Organisational Development (HRODC) Postgraduate Training Institute of Wolverhampton, England. 

This site shares the same features as Haven Works, but the site owners actually seem to want us to take them seriously.  They do offer courses in website design, however.  You may want to consider studying elsewhere.

That's only two examples, but enough pain for one day.  Next post, web sites so ugly they may actually induce seizures in some people.