subject: The Website From Hell [print this page] Website horror stories abound on the WebWebsite horror stories abound on the Web. In the olden Web days, there existed sites that truly kept track of them and even ranked them in order of relative atrocities. There are top 10 or 25 worst web site lists now, but they're usually some snarky laundry list of sites that offend some arbitrary sensibilities of the list writer.
The worst site lists of days of yore actually contained links to objectively horrendous sites. These sites didn't use cascading style sheets. Most ran on barefoot HTML. The problems included white font text against blindingly bright or overly ambitious patterns as backgrounds or textures, indecipherable graphic text buttons, and slow-loading animated gif's with unbelievably long load times. It would take fifteen minutes sometimes for the images to load and Pegasus to fly. By then, most web site visitors had desperately clicked the back button in search of visual sanity.
Just as the Web software has become more complicated, the horrors and havoc that sites can wreak have become more complex. There are some basic rules though that webmasters must adhere to so that a site may truly plumb the depths of depravity that earlier sites have reached. Any webmaster who wishes to make their web visitors shut their browsers post-haste can learn from this list. Here are the rules every webmaster can observe to have his own web site from Hell.
1) Video and sound files auto-loading with the page.
Everyone wants to hear the webmaster's favorite sounds as soon as he reaches the page. If they're graphic, obscene, obnoxious and loud, that's the ideal sound file or video. No one is going to be visiting the Web when they're at work or in a quiet place like a library or something, so the web designer should go loud or go home. Nobody listens to music as they surf, so naturally the auto-loading video isn't going to destroy anyone else's peace of mind.
2) Webmasters should never shrink images, they should let them load as God intended.
Nobody but nobody surfs with dial-up now, so the webmaster is safe in loading egregiously huge files. Thumbnails aren't necessary. If people don't like waiting for them all to load, they can close their browsers and go elsewhere.
3) The webmaster should make his navigation menu very difficult to find and interpret.
Any webmaster can be a Zen webmaster. The best navigation menu is the navigation menu without navigation. Forcing visitors to hover cursors over vague graphics possibly leading to links will help exercise their minds. A web site from Hell has navigation that is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Graphic text links without ALT tags are always fun. Making all links the same text color keeps life interesting for web visitors.
4) The webmaster must make certain half the links on a page go nowhere.
There's really no need to text links. Proofing links takes all the mystery out of the lives of a web visitor.
5) Never proof a web site in multiple browsers. Enough said.
By following these simple five rules, any designer can have his own website from Hell.
