Everything Gone Wrong:
The Fugliest Web Page of 2004
It's that time of year: everybody's into lists. Best this, best that. Which is cool. It seems natural at the end of a period of time to spend the endgame in reflection. I remember how from 1995 through 1999, what time wasn't spent on Pre-Millenium tension and Y2K planning was spent reveling in micro-fads where certain decades would come back and then peter out again and then come back and switch places...sixties chic, then rockabilly and 50's poodle-skirted Rebel Without A Cause fashion, then Titanic Victoriana, then the 70's! The 80's! The early 90's!
This was before VH-1 made it more convienient to live entirely in the past.
But I digress. Rather than give you any best/worst of lists (I'll leave that to fimoculous.com), I'll just throw out extremes as I think of them.
And so here's my vote for the Fugliest Web Page of 2004. I'm sure I'll get lots of email from my loyal readers with fuglier choices, but I kinda limited myself to pages that are professional (or at least aspire to be): magazines, entertainment sites, corporate websites, etc. Web amateurs with an itchy blink tag don't count - it's much too easy to pick on teenagers with bad midi and spinning hobbits 'n shit everywhere. I'd rather highlight pages created by those that should know better.
Which brings me to the gross visual ineptitude of www.playlouder.com, an online web-zine that makes me want to rip my eyes out of my head. Here's a sample page:
To me, this is the web version of a train wreck. Someone designed a background that goes half way down the page and stops at white space. That yellow-highlighting? In the CSS. If this is a style decision, to make it look "DIY" and like a bulletin board, it falls flat. Other sections of the site are just as bad.
I've said enough. Go see for yourself, and if you make web pages, don't ever do it like playlouder.com.
This was before VH-1 made it more convienient to live entirely in the past.
But I digress. Rather than give you any best/worst of lists (I'll leave that to fimoculous.com), I'll just throw out extremes as I think of them.
And so here's my vote for the Fugliest Web Page of 2004. I'm sure I'll get lots of email from my loyal readers with fuglier choices, but I kinda limited myself to pages that are professional (or at least aspire to be): magazines, entertainment sites, corporate websites, etc. Web amateurs with an itchy blink tag don't count - it's much too easy to pick on teenagers with bad midi and spinning hobbits 'n shit everywhere. I'd rather highlight pages created by those that should know better.
Which brings me to the gross visual ineptitude of www.playlouder.com, an online web-zine that makes me want to rip my eyes out of my head. Here's a sample page:
To me, this is the web version of a train wreck. Someone designed a background that goes half way down the page and stops at white space. That yellow-highlighting? In the CSS. If this is a style decision, to make it look "DIY" and like a bulletin board, it falls flat. Other sections of the site are just as bad.
I've said enough. Go see for yourself, and if you make web pages, don't ever do it like playlouder.com.
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