# ugliest websites you've seen



## mi5moav (Aug 27, 2004)

Please help this guy redesign his site. 

http://www.ohioramp.com/

The sadest thing is they actually offer website design... what a deal at only $80 bucks an hour.  Woohoo and check out their shopping pages. 

I's this the last of the ma and pa internet companies I'm suprised earthlink hasn't bought them out. Actually, they must be doing pretty good if they have been around for 5 years, I guess they believe they got a third round of venture capital coming in anyday now.


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## Browni (Aug 28, 2004)

ahhh the age old proverb of **UCK** 

I have one that i seen : http://www.wantage.8k.com/
Warning : 56k - go make a sandwich DSL - go make a cup of coffee


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## ora (Aug 28, 2004)

Browni said:
			
		

> http://www.wantage.8k.com/
> Warning : 56k - go make a sandwich DSL - go make a cup of coffee



Wow, that made my powerbook's fan come on. And a properly ugly and leaden page too, though i think mi5moav's is still a bit worse.


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## Viro (Aug 28, 2004)

Did they purposely make them ugly, or do the web site designers really have that poor sense of tasts?


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## Browni (Aug 28, 2004)

no. they don't know design sense


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## Giaguara (Aug 28, 2004)

this is genial!!! imagine any geocities site .. this is exponential to ^100 

http://www.ulm.ccc.de/~schabi/acc_des/mirror/harald/


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## HateEternal (Aug 28, 2004)

I like the crappy compressed jpegs.

Although those pages are horrid, I actually find computer companies' pages super annoying/hard to navigate. A few of the bad ones are Dell and Gateway. Dell has major problems with their store. The way you go about finding information or customizing computers is different for each computer it seems. Their driver page is crap if you don't know what the exact hardware you have in your machine, Gateway is guilty of this too. They have you enter the serial number, but still give you all the options of downloads for all different configurations of your model. Why don't they just ask for the model number then? If they aren't gonna give you precise information on your serial number what's the point?

I also hate flash websites with a passion for they kill my iBook.


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## Giaguara (Aug 29, 2004)

Well, of the "stylish" webpages then .. there are some things that just plain turn me off and leave the page even if i would need to find something in there. And these annoyances include using flash, resizing my browser, telling that I have to use [a certain browser], unrequested pop-ups, not showing me content because of not accepting unreguested pop-ups ... Seriously, I can't stand resizing my browser. It really annoys me, it's none of the business of anyone what size I want to have the browser window .. and just make it so that it will work, whatever size it is.


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## nixgeek (Aug 29, 2004)

Well, I don't know about this one being the ugliest, but I know it's quite ugly and annoying...maybe more anoying than anything else.  My wife found this site of one of her classmates for a virtual class.  The students have to create a homepage as part of their work, and my wife came across this one...

Here it goes...

http://hometown.aol.com/liquidfairyprep7/page1.html 

I had to stop looking for fear of my eyes melting...  

Oh, make sure you have RealPlayer installed for the full effect...


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## ora (Aug 29, 2004)

nixgeek said:
			
		

> Here it goes...
> 
> http://hometown.aol.com/liquidfairyprep7/page1.html
> 
> ...



My word, having real player does just cap off that experience doesn't it. Just when your eyes have almost got accustomed to the flashing pink, the music starts..... Its this kind of thing that makes me wish there was a smily for 'shudder'.

Its a different kind of bad from the others, of the awful-kit-built-homepage type rather than the designer-was-a-mytopic-hamster type.


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## TommyWillB (Aug 29, 2004)

Come on now!

 It's one thing to criticize the sites of people who claim to be professions, but to pick on people's personal sites ain't right!

  Knowing the crappy tools AOhell users have to deal with I think Nicki did all right.

 I know the first personal Web page I made back in 1995 was pretty horrendous too... Lot's of colors. Lots of animated GIF's. Funny as hell to look at it now.

 Edit: Okay... Found it... Here is my 1st site.


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## scruffy (Aug 29, 2004)

Picking on OALiens for general bad layout, OK maybe that's a little unfair (but only a little.  I mean, come on, scrolling text in the status bar to hide URLs?).  But adding sound to a website - it doesn't matter who you are, that's just wrong.

Tommy - was that a scan of your business card?  Because having your email address in a non-clickable graphic is pure evil genius


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## nixgeek (Aug 29, 2004)

TommyWillB said:
			
		

> Come on now!
> 
> It's one thing to criticize the sites of people who claim to be professions, but to pick on people's personal sites ain't right!
> 
> ...



I guess you're right, but still.. 

Of course, I think I have the right to do so.....check out  my first ever web page.  This was done WWAAYY back at an inservice I went to at Miami Museum of Science.  I was a tech at 3 elementary schools at the time.

Here's my current family homepage now.  It's nothing out of the ordinary since I was trying to keep it simple for older Macs to view easily, while still trying to keep things organized.  Incidentally, I am hosting this on a 68K Mac Quadra 650, which is why I decided to keep true to the platform in its (somewhat) simplicity.

Regardless, at least neither your page nor mine have music on it.  (Although I've contemplated doing that a few times with some original music thanks to my musical background, I still can't help but gag when I experience this which has prevented me from doing the same.  )


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## TommyWillB (Aug 29, 2004)

So I have a degree in boadcasting with a focus on Audio Recording... I did a lot of Audio & Multimedia (you know... CD-ROM's), and I really thought that the Web was going to be the next cool place for Audio.

 ...but it's been almost a decade and Audio on Web pages is still not a technical reality and it universally hated... Probably due to it's bandwidth hogging nature.

   If it wasn't a technical issue, I'm sure people would like _some_ sounds on the Web. I've got a minimalst version on my page that simply speaks my name. (I was playing with the Unix 'say" command.)


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## nixgeek (Aug 29, 2004)

TommyWillB said:
			
		

> So I have a degree in boadcasting with a focus on Audio Recording... I did a lot of Audio & Multimedia (you know... CD-ROM's), and I really thought that the Web was going to be the next cool place for Audio.
> 
> ...but it's been almost a decade and Audio on Web pages is still not a technical reality and it universally hated... Probably due to it's bandwidth hogging nature.
> 
> If it wasn't a technical issue, I'm sure people would like _some_ sounds on the Web. I've got a minimalst version on my page that simply speaks my name. (I was playing with the Unix 'say" command.)



I also earned a degree in Music/Sound Engineering (AA in Music), but after seeing what the life of an audio engineer was like at an internship, I said "hell no."  It was too cutthroat for me.  Mind you, the IT industry isn't that much different, but I guess it also had to do with my age and "life experience" between then and now.  Now, that crap doesn't bug me so much, but back then it did.  I too believed that the web was going to be a new horizon for music and sound.  And while there are some technologies that do make use of the web/internet in a pretty neat way, I don't think it's found the right "fit" yet as far as websites are concerned.  Flash seems to be changing this, but even that sometimes gets annoying depending on how it's implemented.

As far as the bandwidth hogging with sound, that is true if you are talking about audio samples, but not so with MIDI.  The problem is that MIDI has gotten a bad rap because of the crappy PC sound cards out there on all those monopolized PCs.   However, with DLS (Downloadable Sounds), I think this could change.  Most computers today with built-in sound and most sound cards support DLS, and it's extensibly used in games.  They also sound a HECK of a lot better than in sound cards of yore, especially with digital sound capabilities and better MIDI controller support.  If somehow this could be transplanted over to web design, then the viewer can get EXACTLY the musical impact that was intended by the creator.  MIDI clips would sound much better and not use up as much bandwidth as audio clips.

Another thing that can be done is make the site more interactive with sound, but we already see that today with Flash.  Maybe there is a way to do it with simple samples or MIDI sounds (through the use of DLS).  Time to do some research, I guess...


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## chevy (Aug 29, 2004)

I think one of the forces of the Internet is to be non-intrusive. But sound is easily intrusive.
Internet makes possible to isolate himself in community !
The future of sound on Internet will be when everybody will surf with headphones.


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## nixgeek (Aug 29, 2004)

chevy said:
			
		

> I think one of the forces of the Internet is to be non-intrusive. But sound is easily intrusive.
> Internet makes possible to isolate himself in community !
> The future of sound on Internet will be when everybody will surf with headphones.



Well, I believe that sound can be inobtrusive if done properly.  There are sites that have done this well just as there are sites that can make your ears bleed after a while.  Sounds that are subtle once the mouse goes over a link.  Or a subtle pad in the background to add dimension.....I don't know.  But I don't think that something as dynamic as the web should be limited to just static text and graphics.  The only thing that people fail to understand is that too much of a good thing is not a good thing (most AOLian sites, for example).


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## texanpenguin (Sep 16, 2004)

No. The internet isn't for music. That's what iTunes is for. NO embedded audio. NO embedded video.

I can download things I want to watch/listen to, or stream them to a program that I expect music from.

I listen to music ALL THE TIME. When websites put sounds on, no matter how good they are (even embedded mp3s in Flash), they go OFF.

Sounds are acceptable in animations which you've already started, but nothing else.


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## DanTekGeek (Sep 16, 2004)

kinda related to this.....

i run a feature on my blog called "bleek: a weekly reveiw of the blogosphere" in which i feature the best and worst blogs i have found that week. technically, its every 3 days, but thats not the point. there are some particularly horrid blogs in the first edition.

http://www.intarweb-master.blogspot.com


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## Giaguara (Sep 17, 2004)

texanpenguin said:
			
		

> No. The internet isn't for music. That's what iTunes is for. NO embedded audio. NO embedded video.
> 
> I can download things I want to watch/listen to, or stream them to a program that I expect music from.
> 
> ...



oh, http://music.msn.com/ ?


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## Jeffo (Sep 17, 2004)

Giaguara said:
			
		

> this is genial!!! imagine any geocities site .. this is exponential to ^100
> 
> http://www.ulm.ccc.de/~schabi/acc_des/mirror/harald/




yeah this one definately takes the cake for any i have seen!


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