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.