How to Design a Terrible Website

10 Steps to Ensure No Return Visits

1. If it’s not Web 2.0, it’s Wrong 2.0.

The first rule of anything is that EVERYTHING must have a highlight, reflection, or starburst. If it doesn’t, how does the user know it’s important? Navigate to your favorite tutorial site and type in “Web 2.0.” See those tasty plastic buttons? Those would look even better on your site. Get that clicking finger ready and apply those gradients until everything has a nice and even glow. Go heavy on the reflections, though. The site should look more like an experiment in symmetry than a source of useful content.

2. But why stop there?

Keep Photoshop open; you’re not finished. In the Filters menu, you’ll find a gold mine of fantastic effects for your website. Like the canvas texture? Throw it on there! Like the glowing edges? They’re welcome to come too! After you’ve finished your delicious design stew, don’t forget the bevels, satins, drop shadows, inner shadows, outer glows, inner glows and strokes. What colors should you use? Just pick your favorite! Red and blue will do just fine.

3. Make EVERYTHING Flash

If it’s Flash, it’s cool - and if it’s worth putting on the web, it has to be cool. Now, you might be tempted to make everything one nice Flash masterpiece, but this is NOT the best way to go about it. Make ten - maybe fifteen - different files. You need at least three for the navigation, plus another four or five for soft focus photos of people shaking hands. If you can count the Flash elements on your page with one hand, consider yourself a miserable failure.

4. Use Images Instead of Text

So you’ve finally finished that Flashterpiece, but a few things managed to slip through the cracks. No worries! You can make them into images! Open up Photoshop again - scratch that - open up Microsoft Paint. Once you’re there, close your eyes and pick a font. Now close your eyes and try to spell. Pretty soon, you shold end op with some fine inyro text for yoru isite. Add it to the sp;ash page and contunjue to step 4.

5. If it’s sitting still, it can’t be right.

Now that you have images that vaguely describe what you think you intended your site to kind of be about, you have to make them move. Go to a free script repository and find about four or five different scripts to move your crap around the page. Go crazy - the more the merrier. Search engines can’t see your content, so why should people be able to? You can’t argue with that logic.

6. Play Lots of Music

“Just what is that content dancing to?” your visitors might wonder. Why keep them in the dark? Get some music on that page ASAP. Find a good MIDI track from 1995 and set it to loop. Better if it’s the MIDI version of American Pie by Don McLean or Open Arms by Journey. You’ve got no time for an off button, so just forget about that. More work lies ahead…

7. Color the Scrollbars

I cannot stress this one enough. If your scrollbars look too normal, what on earth could a visitor find interesting about your site? I once saw a script that made the user’s scrollbar scroll through 28 different colors. There’s not a lot I wouldn’t do to find that again. But if you can’t settle for 28, just pick your favorite colors again. At random, assign each color to an element of the scrollbar. Be sure to make the middle section invisible, and for an added effect, get some horizontal scroll bar action on the bottom of your page.

8. Content is for Squares

“Alright,” you say. “I’ve gotten this far, but what should my site be about?” Animated GIFs, of course! Why else was the web invented? If your site doesn’t provide content fit for a 12 year old’s MySpace, you went wrong somewhere. Nothing says “hipster” like a three dimensional glass of milk or a dancing fish. Keep the white background and distort the proportions to really make your page POP.

9. Pop! Poppity Pop Pop! Pop Pop Popperoo!

How can you show your visitors you care? By force feeding them. Pick a free web host (what, you weren’t going to invest money into this, were you?) and get your files online. Banner ads aren’t enough. You want pop-ups to bloom like flowers on the screens of your users. With any luck, some of those flowers will force them to download adware or spyware (kudos for both!).

10. It’s All About the Presentation

Your page should, at the very least, take a full minute to load. This raises the problem of a high bounce rate, though. Not a problem at all. All that JavaScript we implemented earlier does a fine job of locking up browsers. By the time the target computer is useable again, your site will have already made its glorious entrance and put a smile onto the face of yet another person.

Conclusion

Follow these steps and you’re guaranteed to succeed on the web. Make it a race with your friends to see who can get their hit counter to display the highest number (no cheating!). Add bonuses like red site ratings from McAfee for a little extra fun. Whatever you do, bookmark this guide for future reference. This is information you DON’T want to lose.

Home