Interesting examples there!
(the link to mcdonalds needs sorted though)

It looks like most of these sites havent been redesigned for at least 4 or 5 years looking at the coding and the design styles.
For large companies such as these that is a real surprise. Some smart person in their marketing dept should suggest to redo the site. Sure fire way for promotion there!!

An interesting point to note is that I also checked the UK versions of the sites to compare and while a few are the same most have been redesigned more recently and actually arent too bad. Also the McDonalds UK site seems to be a "fixed" version of the dodgy US one with Flash that actually works.

Good list and examples!
Intersting observation and comments which is sadly true in most cases.
How poor is the accenture menu's mouse over effect? Inside pages are even worse.
Gillette is asking for too much in patience.

I always love website reviews -- even more so of some of the TOP BRANDS in the world. Wow, while I'm no expert (haven't even re-designed my own site since the last story years ago) I must say I was QUITE SURPRISED (having done more than my share of CSS design reading and the like) on a lot of these.

Maybe shocked is the better word if we must be truthful!!! Really great insight and an alert of "hey make sure you don't do this like this".

I'm still recovering from that Gillette thing -- wow! You know, the money and resources available to these top-tier companies makes this even more baffling though there are always instances of "more money than sense" scenarios that can be spotted from all corners of the earth. On some of these UI and/or IA were indeed just two - four letters known to be in the alphabet.

I agree to Mr. David

I was disappointed with McDonalds, Wrigley and Duracell from your post. Mickey D's has been bad for some time and I too had the same reaction. I would expect the same creativity from the Duracell motion graphics in their TV commercials would come thru better than what is displayed. I wanted to really see if Wrigley had that childish design but the website has a new sexy design. Maybe the merger with Mars sparked it???

@Christian: Couldn't agree with you more on some of these sites...they're terrible. Honestly, I think a lot of these companies just don't really care too much about their websites. All of them were around long before the web (well, before the web boom) and the only reason they even have a web presence is because they felt like they should own their own dot com because, well, everybody else does!

I think it's probably not a question of good versus bad design for them. Instead, it's mostly likely a question of how much a well designed web site is going to cost versus how much it will add to the bottom line. When it really comes down to it, they obviously don't believe it will add very much.

A lot of these are just shockingly bad examples of web site design.

Big companies have a lot of problems with the web:

• They relegate responsibility for creating and maintaining it to the IT department rather than the marketing department where it would be more at home.

• They have no idea what they're looking for when they hire staff to create and maintain their web sites. Even if they do somehow figure out that they need someone who's an expert with CSS, they have no way of figuring out if candidates are truthful with their responses. Someone they're interviewing says, "Yeah, sure. I'm an expert with CSS." and there's no one to follow up on that and check out the candidate's portfolio to see if it's actually the truth.

• They have too many stakeholders vying for control of prize real estate - every department thinks they're the important and deserve to have the information that's relevant to them front and center. The outcome is often a direction-less mishmash that's not helpful to site visitors at all.

• Large companies are nearly always more concerned with getting out their marketing message rather than making their sites usable and accessible. They'd rather clobber site visitors over the head with their message than actually spend time and money figuring out what site visitors want and expect from their web site. They hide useful information that a lot of site visitors are looking for - how often have you unsuccessfully tried to get a simple phone number from a big company's web site?

These sites are a great example of companies struggling with these problems.

Despite the annoying maximising, the Ferrari site does a very good job of presenting the brand - it looks exactly what I'd expect it to look like.

The Duracell website is just plain awful, though!

Great examples! I'm floored at how pathetic these websites are.

Another thing that always frustrates me is when I visit a website like Canon, UPS or FedEx and they ask me which country I'm in. To me, it would make more sense if they just detected my country and allowed me to change it if I was looking for that.

i couldn't agree better. Some of the web site just don't make any sense in terms of design look and feel.

I'm not surprised. How inspired can a designer be to create for corporate slime balls?

I have to agree with your assessments. These are some truly awful sites. Try taking a look at the Ben & Jerry's site. I quite like it but is see why a lot of people wouldn't