No matter how little you paid, you paid too much.
Non-profit organizations and governmental agencies are easy targets for evil web designers who spend more time with their own promotion and SEO than actually designing, and whose sites end up being a mess of templated code from some out-of-the-box Site Builder, fail to pass any sort of smell test for W3C validation or accessibility guidelines, display like crap on all but the oldest browsers, and pretty much suck the life out of anyone unfortunate enough to stumble on them.
Below are 5 organizations whose websites are not worth any price they may have paid, and in fact may be losing them money and hurting their reputation. I feel bad for them. And angry at the douchebags who got paid to create them.
If you’re a designer/developer with a heart, consider searching out one of these (or similar) entities once a year and offer your services on a charity basis. It’s truly some of the most edifying work out there.
United States Department of the Treasury
Take a look at that lefthand nav! And the bulleted lists in the righthand sidebar! And the way the content section explodes out the right side of the container!
Nye Communities Coalition
Nothing really to say about this one except “Scales?!!”
ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training
Seems fine if your browser window is tiny, awful when it’s stretched wider, and when you realize the navigation is in the Selection box at the bottom of the page, you’ll flip and consider trying to find application information on the site of its sister school in Russia, even if you don’t know the language!
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
(Perhaps the best of the worst on this page, but awful compared with other transit orgs, and with enough animated GIFs to screw in a lightbulb.
Pahrump Valley Times
Local Newspaper sites: terrible across the board. Maybe the saddest on this list, as they represent (for me) the direction traditional journalism should head to keep itself from dying off completely.
