Great Brands with Bland, Boring, or Just Plain Bad Websites
There are a few brands, the crème de la crème, that consistently show up on various “Top 100″ type lists. You know which ones I’m talking about. They’re household names and for the most part come out on top because they’ve met and exceeded the expectations of reviewers/consumers/whoever. They’ve got the best of everything (insert famous ad tagline here) and they’re usually not hurting too badly financially. So when I stumbledupon the latest “Top 100 Brands” list here I took a look at some of the companies’ websites guessing I was in for an overdose of inspiration…
I was wrong. A few were great, most were fine, and some were pretty bad. The bad ones are here…enjoy!
For a site with upwards of 80,000 visitors per month its amazing how dated Duracell is, and the slow-to-load, amateur-ish flash intro doesn’t help.
Yes, its bad – but I was going to let this one slide because it was UPS. That was until I checked out compete.com and found out they average over 12 million visits per month! I am truly speechless.
Better than UPS…but not by much.
AH my eyes!! Bad color choice and much too cluttered.
Cars this cool deserve a better website…’nuff said.
Granted it gets better as you delve into the site – but you don’t want this to be the first thing people see. Boring.
I know its ‘professional’, and that a website probably isn’t a high priority for them right now…but come on, this looks like they haven’t upgraded since 1998.
I’m not lovin’ it. The black background could look cool, but they have so little content on the page it ends up being overwhelming. The navigation is hard to use as well. They made it super interactive, problem is that when you move your mouse inadvertently what you were reading can disappear.
Where’s the yummy food? Seriously…not one chocolate chip? I realize they are a huge company, but it seems like they’re taking themselves a bit too seriously with this extremely corporate-feeling site.
With second quarter earnings this year of $4.98 billion you’d think they’d be willing to drop the $5K or so it would take to make their site modern and maybe a bit better looking.
Avon’s business is looking pretty…they should know better.
The biggest/best consulting firm around and this is all they’ve got? Tired design with hardly any navigation to speak of doesn’t convey the image they’re probably going for.
Some useful features, but the site doesn’t have a very welcoming feel – why would I want to stay here? I think not having any pictures at all is a lost opportunity for any site trying to sell accommodations.
Know any other great brands whose websites don’t quite live up to your expectations? Let us know in the comments!
Tags: bad design, bad websites, branding, redesign
November 6th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
haha this is funny. good points, i have never checked out most of these sites
November 7th, 2008 at 3:33 am
They don’t need flashy websites because their brand is known world wide. People would just type their brand name on search engines and there they come up… People still look to their websites for information about their product…
November 20th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
I sometimes would rather have a plain website for companies such as FedEx so I can find everything easily and just get what I need done.