The Ugly

Best Websites Design List

While this is only a single article on a much larger website that doesn't look too bad overall, while looking for ideas for the interesting website blog posts, I stumbled across a page called "27 of the Best Website Designs to Inspire You in 2020." The irony of the hideousness of this page was too great not to include it in my post. To be honest, it isn't too bad looking for most of the page, with one exception. The kerning in the first list, that names the websites prior to describing them in another, much nicer looking list, is absolutely abysmal. The numbers and names overlap each other, and the numbers are in bold, making the first few letters of the names unreadable in a few of the cases.

It seems almost as if the creator of this page visited a website and wrote down the name in a draft to later describe it in depth, then forgot to remove the draft. Kerning is extremely important in both the visual appeal and usability of a website. While terrible kerning will certainly grab someone's attention, it is not a good type of attention. It is jarring and in extreme cases can slow down the user's ability to discern information, which can frustrate them and cause them to leave the website.

As ugly as this page is, the rest of the website actually seems somewhat competently constructed, so I wouldn't really say one should avoid it. However in the future they should better vet their authors and proofread their submissions more. The page I chose to highlight was so bad that some of it was quite literally unreadable, which should never be the case. Even a much simpler page would have been a better alternative to what they shared. The mobile version is no better than the desktop version, and there are no major differences between browsers.