Web design trends come and go, some stay around too long and there are a few that probably should have never existed. Many of the trends below could and can still be found on a variety of sites including personal sites, business sites and yes even web designer portfolio sites. Some of the worst trends are graphical ones such as the use of horrible GIF animations, intro pages and under construction graphics.
Others are more on the web development side and include trends such as using the blink tag, guestbook scripts or certain software. Graphics trends seem to come and go much quicker and nowadays can spread like wildfire because of social media and the overall viralness of the web. I have seen design tutorials written by one person on a blog quickly spread across the web and inspire many designers to create and use similar effects in their own projects, only to see the style die away within months and be replaced by something new.
A current trend now could be the use of many different kinds of social media icons on websites and blogs. Eventually the social media craze could pass and with it the use of these icons and it could end up on a list like this in the future. Only time will tell what the next classically bad trends will be. At the time they may seem like a good idea, but its all about staying current in the web design community so you are not caught sporting something that is considered outdated by the majority.
These trends come and go quickly so expect to see a list like this again soon. In the meantime, enjoy the post and if you remember any trends worthy of the list below please leave a comment so we can enjoy the memories and help teach new webmasters and designers what NOT to do.
Classically Bad Web Design and Development Trends
1. Mouse Cursor Trailers
People must have gotten bored with the standard mouse cursor arrow, because suddenly it seemed like everyone was adding some wacky effect trailing their cursor or they would change the look of the cursor itself from an arrow to something else.
2. Custom Scrollbars
About the same time people started customizing mouse cursors they started looking for other elements to customize such as website scrollbars. While not as annoying as custom cursors, they weren’t the best for usability once changed. The scrollbar consists of several elements that are commonly customized such as the slider, track, top and bottom arrows.
3. Blink Tag
It rarely gets more annoying than this… The blink tag would simply make anything you put inside the tag flash and it was usually bright colored text. There had to be better ways of drawing attention than this!
4. Website Visitor Counters
It used to be cool to show off how many visitors you had gotten thus far, but website visitor counters really did more harm than good. If numbers were too high nobody believed the site owner and if the website had too few visitors everyone thought the site wasn’t popular. Plus they were ugly as hell!
5. Short Repeating .wav Files
The most annoying thing by far a webmaster can do is play music or some other sound effect automatically when a webpage is loaded. People who browse the web often listen to the radio or music when viewing sites and its extremely annoying running into something like this. Equally annoying are banners and pop ups that make stupid sounds or play music. Back in the day it was even worse because horrible sounding .wav files were rampant and they were often short clips on LOOP.
6. Horrible .gif Animations
The never ending journey of webmasters striving to enhance their websites continued when people started creating animated images in GIF format. These simple animations were often very poor quality, cheezy, annoying and used in excess in odd areas of web pages.
7. Incredibly Annoying Popups
Thankfully aggressive marketing is becoming less and less popular, but not too long ago there were popups EVERYWHERE on all kinds of websites. Pop ups can still be found here and there, like on crappy MySpace graphic sites, but any webmaster who cares about their visitors at all usually stays away from using them. The worst pop ups are ones that make noise as well.
8. Animated Weather Backgrounds
Its hard enough to read bright text over black or pattern backgrounds, but then came the glory days of animated backgrounds. Those patterns were now changing colors, blinking and browsers of the web started seeing things like falling snow backgrounds and rain. Webmasters would then forget to change the background, so it was common to see snow falling in the middle of summer on your screen.
9. Free Clipart
Before high quality stock photography and vector art became available at affordable prices, clipart ruled supreme. The quality of the clipart was usually pretty horrible, but most of it was free or offered in huge packs so they took over the web. Surprisingly enough, there are still HUGE volumes of searches being done for clipart on the web, but most of it is used for home printing of greeting cards and such. Thankfully, most web designers seems to avoid clipart like the plague.
10. Frames
Frames allow you to display more than one web page in the same browser window, each one being independent of the other. Simply put, frames are bad, outdated and should be avoided. They mess up a lot of things for visitors and they go against the fundamental design of the web.
11. Under Construction Graphics and Pages
When webmasters became so sick of their websites they could not stand the sight of them anymore, they started putting up under construction pages and graphics. Unfortunately for them, this was a huge mistake and could easily destroy any hard work they put into driving traffic to their website. Just leave the old site up until the new one is ready to launch!
12. Website Intro Pages
Looking to turn away most of your visitors within 3 seconds of them coming to your site? Set up an intro page! How these pages became so popular is a mystery, but its a proven fact all they do is hurt your website. These pages often featured some sort of welcome message and a “website best viewed in” message. The goal of a good website design should always be to get your visitors to the information they want with the fewest clicks possible and intro pages were a totally unnecessary click.
13. Pageview Extending
Some annoying websites decided to start splitting up content and making you click through more pages than you normally should to increase their pageview statistics. A lot of major websites and news sites still do this even though the content could easily fit on one page. It makes reading articles extremely annoying, but they don’t care because it enhances their website statistics so they can make a few more bucks at the expense of their users.
14. Website Best Viewed in Text and Graphics
Back in the day it was very common to see text and graphics telling viewers which browser they should view a site in. Nowadays it is more commonly known that websites should be tested across all browsers. If web coding standards are followed there usually isn’t TOO much trouble, but its still always important to double check your site with all the big boys. Did anyone ever really think a website visitor would switch browsers just to view some new website?
15. Bright Text on Black Backgrounds
The most fundamental aspect of usability design is making text easy to read. Most websites are meant to inform in one way or another, so making text difficult to read just seems crazy. Many webmasters are not designers, but its really not hard to figure out that its much easier to read black text on a white background than yellow text on a black background.
16. Scrolling Text – Marquee Tag
Reading rainbow colored text on a black background is painful enough, but webmasters decided it would be even cooler to make the text move from side to side via the marquee tag.
17. Sign My Guestbook
Guestbooks were one of the first attempts at creating some sort of interaction between a website visitor and the owner, but really they were just an attempt to collect personal information of visitors.
Feedback forms ended up being better for user input and email newsletters ended up becoming king in the marketing world. Now instead of asking some one kindly to sign your guestbook its easier to offer something of value for free to create a highly targeted mailing list.
18. Talking Virtual People and Characters
Another trend of many online businesses was to use talking people or cartoons to communicate a message. The concept seemed cool at the time and some of the services out there were pretty high-quality. One service would use real actors to speak your message and another let you create a highly-customizable cartoon looking characters that would say almost anything you want.
They pretty much died off because the auto starting sound is considered very annoying to website visitors and they proved to be no where near as useful as everyone thought. It would have made more sense to have the virtual person as a viewing option on a product tour page, instead of having the feature jump in your face when you first load the site.
19. Insanely Over Beveled Buttons
It is important to draw attention to a website’s navigation and/or call to actions, but go easy on the bevels! Playing with filters and layer styles is one of the first things designers do when they get their hands on Photoshop, but thankfully this style has become very cliché and less of this is seen on the web today, even from new graphic and web designers.
20. Misleading and Annoying Banners
Equally as annoying and misleading as many popups, there were a variety of nasty web banners that spread across the web. They often claimed the viewer was a winner, had a virus, had a new message or had some other silly hook to lure people in. The only sad part is that a lot of these web banners are still floating around and they are the same ones that have been around for a long time.
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Image Credits – http://hosanna1.com/
{ 41 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice post! I hate annoying counters.
Love the new site btw.
Andy, from WebDesignerDepot
Thanks for checking out my blog Andy!
LMAO @ the dragon counter
These are all definitely the worst in web design, and ones that many had forgotten, but these are definitely not trends. I’d say more like relics from the 90s though.
You’re SO right about leaving the old site up until the new one is ready. Great post, someone had to point this all out.
“Insanely Over Beveled Buttons” …that just cracked me up.
Now where’s your guestbook…
Loooool, I was very guilty of implementing these when I first discovered the world of web design. I’m still trying to break the habit of #15, aaarrggh!
awesome…it’s to bad there is still so much of that crap out there still…
So true and so funny ! Brilliant post
Great post Gino. Looks like this will be a good blog. Do you have a Guestbook we can sign?
Oh my! had you written this post in ‘96 it would have been very insightful. Today? It’s just lazy work. Most of these trends you are referring to have died a long time ago.
Great post! I so remember thinking marquees and intro pages were cool!
What about web sites which block the context menu and display an alert when you try to use it?
Hi, nice post. But out of interest, can you tell me what is fundamentally wrong with iFrames? For us in things such as Google Maps they’re necessary no?
Ah web design in the 90’s was great wasn’t it?
If you are still using 10 year old tech you should be ashamed of yourself.
Maybe I’m the only one, but I really miss the days when these trends were the norm. It must be nostalgia.
Great post. Some of those things I have not seen in ages and it takes me back to years ago when the web was a much different place, using a lot of those terrible trends.
He he, don’t forget the use of crappy 1 $ microstock images on business websites:
http://fairtradephotographer.blogspot.com/2010/03/microstock-why-would-reputable-company.html
#10 iFrames.
iFrames and Frames are two different things. You make a compelling case for the latter of the two and I totally agree with that.
However, on the former, when used appropriately (say the combination of Flash and an iFrame on a page) an iFrame can be very useful.
#17 Sign my Guestbook
I’ll disagree here. These were one of the very first forays into social interaction as well as the blog comments you see here. Definitely ugly by today’s standards and misused in it’s heyday.
Also, dancing babies rock!
I almos clicked on the virus scan banner. You got me on that
With all due respect, I can’t remember the last time I saw any of these things on a legitimate website. They are all certainly bad design decisions but to refer to their use as “trends” is a bit of hyperbole.
You do raise an interesting question about the ubiquitous appearance of social media icons on websites (uh, like on *this* site), but I view it as a positive thing, rather than negative. Website designers and developers *should* adapt quickly to changing environments. The trick is discerning whether one is adding value for the site visitor, or is simply following a fad.
good post, i actualy saw ‘best displayed using internet explorer’ coupled with ‘optimized for 1024 x 768′ in a footer of a NEW site just last week…
man, i miss geocities.
Sadly enough, I am guilty of implementing almost every one of those evil trends.
I think Shout Boxes should be added to that list though, they tended to slow down users computers or overload their bandwidth and were super annoying.
How did mouse cursor trails ever go out of style? Those were awesome. I remember creating a website for a college class and I made it a point to use every annoying web tools I could think of: Mouse cursor trails, animated characters, flashing text, annoying midi music that automatically started upon visiting the site.
Luckily for me, our grade depended on the content only – not the web design itself.
Good times!
I would have to agree with a lot of your examples here. Web design is getting cleaner and more elegant as the years pass. Some new and improved ways to make your website stand out more is Flash. As long as it is implemented by an expert who knows how to use it, Flash can make a pleasant experience for your viewers without the headaches. Another thing about into pages is that it depends on your viewers. What is your market? If you are a business, these pages should be avoided. Some informational website could find well in this practice. For example a group that was going to Rwanda – they create a website to grab people’s attention that were browsing the web. They wanted to show the importance of the need. The website started with a video that grabbed the hearts of their viewers. I felt this was a good move on their part.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for all the great comments glad you all enjoyed the posts!
These are def some OLDER trends. I tried to go old school with the post. Ill probably do another post soon with more recent stuff.
i think, in a few years, there will be another point in this list, called “flash websites”
Funny, back in the days, I’ve used all of them
Point #10. are you referring to iFrames, or just frames cause you mention both and they are very different.
Yes, frames are terrible but iFrames aren’t exactly “outdated” as you put it.
Great post. Reminded me of that time when Homer created his own site with a dancing Jesus and flying toasters. Gotta love these for a good laugh though!
Wow, what a nice walk down memory lane. I forgot about many of these… every now and then I’ll be in a meeting and someone will mention the blink tag jokingly. Honestly though, it makes me want to design a page with all these on it and present it to my design team as upcoming design trends. What were some of your favorites? Also, any examples of sites you can share that still have these on them? Thanks for the fun read.
xD. Very amusing.
I liked this post! I hate the galloping unicorns and roaring tigers. They should stay in the 90s where they belong!
great post mate.. I’ll be careful NOT to use the Under Construction page. I was thinking of putting it into my site..
you saved my life
Jon – I liked the mouse trailers I remember seeing some pretty funny ones back in the day. If you google “worst website designs” you should find some posts that lists some sites that still have a lot of this stuff on the list.
Web-d – Yes I meant frames not iframes sorry about the typo!
Nice article, you are pretty much describing my first sites back in the 90s.
Definitely horrible design elements, but I don’t think any of these are trending right now.
I got a strange, entirely unwarranted sense of nostalgia from reading this.
aghhhh! nooooo! i thought we were finally free of the dancing baby years ago! it’s evil i tell ya, EVIL!
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