As part of my Website Nightmares, first up is Indianapolis Power and Light, with a website that appears to have been largely committee-driven. Some of the issues here include:
- Search box relegated to the bottom of the page.
- No direct login box to pay your bill, the #1 reason why anyone would visit this site.
- A lot of repeating links and text that waste space. They’re at least 3 links on the homepage to show power outages (which is somewhat silly to have online because how would you check for an outage if you’re without power?)
- The site uses frames. A lot.
- The site is squished into a frame size that’s way too small and is top-left aligned to the browser view window.
Here’s what the site looks like now:
Here’s my 1-hour redesign:
You can download the PNG source file, with layers.
They’re many other issues with this site, such as poor URL structure, and they’re also problems with my redesign, but it’s a start in just under an hour.
This is a really cool concept.