Here’s one for the Albuquerque Journal’s blooper reel:

The garbled ALL CAPS text is bad enough. But I’m honking my horn over the confusing misuse of the lines (horizontal rules), which should be used sparingly to cluster related information, not separate a heading from its content. Traditionally, a horizontal rule tells the skimming mind that a transition has occurred and that all before is one piece and all after is another. It is a visual pause that says, hey, pay attention now. Yes, you can ignore (or be ignorant of) that and use the rule purely as decoration. The real issue is making a site easy to use. Well, not so for abqjournal.com, whose Web designer is locked in a windowless room and not allowed to look at other Web sites nor read about design. The powers that be at the Journal HATE the Web and it shows.

Although there are many ways to rework this example, I’d eliminate the text above each line and the line itself, making the text currently below each line the link. For minimal change, move the line above each link so that related content is kept together and separated from other content, although that’s still an overuse of the abused horizontal rule.

PS: I would not publicly castigate an individual for the look of a personal website. The Web belongs to us all and gives each of us real freedom of expression. But this site belongs to a corporation (the heroes of 21st Century AmeriCo) and the state’s largest paper. The Albuquerque Journal must be held to some standard higher than a teenager’s fan-blog (sorry to insult teenagers with the comparison).