Bad website

Miserable web design at its best can be found at the following address: http://www.appomattox.com/. Brace yourself.

The "design sins" are too many too mention. What a shame too! Appomattox, Virginia played a significant role in the Civil War. You wouldn't know it from looking at this site.

1. Formal, centered text: it doesn't get much better than this. Even the links are centered. Truly original.

2. If the obvious, "Please Scroll Down for a Detailed Index" doesn't clarify things for you, I'm not sure what can. Not to mention, it is centered text. Maybe, they could have made it bold or larger if they wanted people to actually read it. The point is, however, that it is pointless to include it. By the time you see this line, you've already scrolled past it.

3. Speaking of scrolling, this page requires a lot of it. Not exactly a good thing.

4. The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture book advises designers to avoid "boxitis". This page has a little problem with that.

5. The white space (and green white space for that matter) is poorly utilized. In the chart, there are even blank spaces where either the designer ran out of topics to list or didn't know how to remove the blank boxes.

6. The "bold" decision to use Times New Roman font was ingenious. With the exception of the "appomattox.com" in the visual (which is also atrocious), the type is the same throughout the entire page.

7. The contrast the designer(s) used was teal green. Not very dramatic. Even with the teal background, the text itself does not stand out from the rest of the text. Making the other text bold doesn't help either.

8. Using all caps in the boxes just looks bad. Not only do the letters look rectangular, they are placed inside rectangles. Also, the capitalized lettering makes the space look very tight. This page struggles with proximity as well.

9. It appears the designer(s) attempted to anchor the page with the teal coloring. The heading has teal and so do the rectangles near the bottom. However, they typed more text after the boxes; and although they signal that you have reached the end by thanking you for visiting, you continue to scroll because visually it appears the page will never end.

10. The site does not have an effective visual that connects with the town of Appomattox. The Non-Designer’s Design Book shows great examples using the rat. Yet, this site uses a smudged picture of one of the historic buildings in Appomattox. The only way people would recognize the house is if they had previously visited the location.

The entire page is a tacky nightmare. It looks like someone's ten year old put it together for an extra credit assignment at school.