I find it hard to order food in a restaurant from a poorly designed menu.

Therefore, identifying a bad website was easy – so many to choose from. I finally picked Paperrad. At least, I think that’s the name of this site. I’m not sure what it’s attempting to “promote” but, you can see why it makes my teeth hurt.

WARNING: manic blinking, unreadable type, and over-stimulating color.

Less is More
Overall, the moving and blinking should be eliminated. It gives me a headache.

Location. Location. Location.
The central format seems interesting, but I can’t tell from the crazy layout what the site is promoting. If it about books, animation or music, it should be obvious to the visitor at first glance. Since I don’t know what Paperrad means, perhaps the use of a tagline would be good here? “We offer the best Midgets on the planet!” Then move on from there.

Color is a Tool – Not a Weapon
The use of color for this site MUST be revisited. My God! It’s like a Jimi Hendrix Experience without the music. [Thank god, it doesn't have music!] Considerate use of color can be used to divide and organize the content. A blue header with a blue box, a red header jumps to a red box, etc.. In addition, color helps set the “mood.” If this site is selling music, bright colors are helpful, but we don’t need all of them at once.

Can you Read Me Now?
Designers are blessed with some wonderful fonts. From serif to san serif, cursive to woodcut. Fonts give “voice” to a page, but given that, the text must be readable. Otherwise, the message is lost and your visitor goes away. Most of this site is unreadable, copy is squeezed up to images, set against unreadable colored backgrounds or set in a illegible point sizes. I was never so glad to see plain black Helvetica as I was in some of the text blocks in this site. It was my only relief.

Know Your Audience
Last, this site might be attempting an “edgy” feel with it’s brightly colored retro pixelated images, the dancing background, it all seems like someone with a new toy. If this was a nod to Pac Man, or some old bartop computer game, then I would expect to see more content skewed to that age range; 35-40 years. What audience was this web designer trying to attract?

You only get one chance to make a good first impression. This web site is so visually aggravating that it lost me at “hello.”

Remember, use your HTML powers for good, not evil.