Web Design for the Clinically Insane Obsessive-Compulsive

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Having been on the web since the early days, as many of us here have been, we’ve all been exposed to poor web design.

Geocities, MySpace and plenty of others have shown us what the average lay person can accomplish when presented with ugly, garish, musical, no-knowledge-required canned page design.

The Time Cube page showed us what a nutjob is inclined to do when given a copy of Microsoft Front Page and trained to use only the colour and font size options.

And then there’s Bella De Soto.

Truly in a league of her(?) own, Bella takes everything that can be learned about how not to design a website, fed it steroids and human growth hormones, and then, for want of copious amounts of Thorazine, filled it with megabytes and megabytes of … well … crap.

It is a website that looks like the insane wallpapered pastiche of newspaper clippings, covert photos, hand-scribbled notes, rants, and random ejaculations of a combination conspiracy theorist and serial killer.

WARNING: This site is not the least bit friendly to slow computers, computers with low memory, old browsers, slow internet connections, Macs, or sentient life forms. It will take forever to load even for people with fat pipes, but if nothing else it is entertaining to watch as you become more and more incredulous that is’ still freakin’ loading, and just when you think it’s done, it keeps going.

2

Good thing there’s a clock on there, because it’s been 3 minutes and all I can see besides the clock is the title. But it is still loading :slight_smile:

3

I was just thinking this morning, ‘there are all these country codes, but you never see a “.us” domain name, I wonder who uses them’. I was even going to ask a GQ (or perhaps offer an IMHO) about it.

Not anymore.

Two and a half minutes, so far I have a background, the words ‘Bella De Soto’ in no particularly fancy font, and a broken image tag.

ETA: no wait, the image icon’s turned into a fetching blue bullet point.

…

…

My, that sure… is… a… fetching… blue bullet p…o…i

[timeout]

ETA: holy shit, a big green rectangle.

4

Annnnnndd noooooooooooooo…

…W, we’re getting to some content. About…

W, as it happens.

5

Note, if you will, not only the height of the page as indicated by your scrollbar, but the width.

6

13:46:00 - Activates link. I’m using Firefox 3.5 on a Mac running OSX 10.6.1.
13:46:30 - The words ‘Bella de Soto’ appear at the top left of the window.
13:48:00 - Broken image symbol appears.
13:48:45 - We have background!
13:49:00 - There is a clock at the lower right.
13:50:00 - The words at the top left have become ‘Bella De Soto Matt Gonzalez VP Candidate>>>’. The broken JPEG is now a blue bullet point.
13:51:00 - green rectangle. More empty rectangles at the right. A small picture of clouds in a blue sky. Text.

Okay, it’s looking like things are starting to fill in. But what kind of website loads so slowly on a ten-megabit-per-second connection that I can provide a typed play-by-play?

Eek. I just noticed the scrool bars. Apparently this webpage has a page size several kilometres on a side. And there’s content all the way over and down.

7

Good God.

The ridiculous thing is, I have this De Soto website loading up on my own laptop, whilst on my mum’s brand new laptop, an end-of-line model that we got cheap from PC World TODAY, I’m trying to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista.

And I think Ms De Soto is still going to win.

I heard you say Fascist Dictatorship
Bushy Bush!!!

8

Good grief, is that a 2,603KB JPEG file on the page?

And a 624KB JPEG for a poem which could be done with text?

And a 1,413KB banner.

And he/she is writing a book.

9

Egads, that’s insanity.

Not long ago I saw another site with one design “feature” that I thought was really stupid. In order to use it, you need to create a username and password. The user name has to be your e-mail address. Whatever you type in is what it becomes. However, when you log in, it only lets you type in the stuff before the @ sign. Everything after that you have to choose from a dropdown. You know, @aol.com, @yahoo.com, @comcast.net, etc. If you didn’t sign up with one of those domains, you’re screwed.

10

I’m not sure if that’s the absolute worst web design I’ve ever seen, but if you’re simply looking at how many poor design choices can be made on one page, it’s the hands-down winner.

I have a standard DSL connection and an iMac, and I actually did see content to read within about 30 seconds. After 7 minutes, though, it was still trying to render stuff and I was getting tired of the whole machine slowing down and giving me intermittent spinning beachballs (the Mac equivalent of the Windows hourglass), so I finally gave up.

It’s bad. Very very bad.

11

I must have a helluva dialup connection. Got the clock, background, and about half the text in under 2 mins, which would make for a couple hours’ reading right there, and a few other elements. But it hurt my eyes too much to continue.

12

I just downloaded Ubuntu Linux. I wonder what it looks like in Linux. :slight_smile:

13

I noticed some text there that reads “this is a large, unconventional site, please allow som” (the remainder of the text disappears behind some floating, broken image object).

How can anyone produce such a hideously broken web page, unless it’s just a natural reflection of a hideously broken brain?

14

I don’t know how long I had it open, but when I got tired and closed it crashed my Internet.
So horrible, it almost comes around the other way as a kind of beauty.

15

If ‘content’ really is the appropriate word here…

16

Well she does set out in one of the earlier loading banners that her website is “perpetually organic.”

17

Kind of encapsulates the whole experience, doesn’t it?

Yes, I think that’s pretty much it right there. It’s basically what would happen if you could braindump straight to HTML.

Like if you could take a “blank” human and combine and splice in the DNA of Ed Wood, John Merrick, select members of WorldNet Daily, and a howler monkey.

Mold is organic. It also appears more quickly.

18

Okay, I have to try. I have a 10mbit connection, a 3.4GHz quad-core processor and 8 gigs of RAM. If nothing else, this site is a litmus test for the ultimate web browsing experience, so let’s see how long it takes this steaming pile to load on my system. (I posted this originally from my work computer, which is slow and connected to a slow network connection)

Aaaaaaaand … GO.

19

Mine crashed too. Then when I brought Firefox back up, it brough back all my tabs…INCLUDING Ms. Bella’s website. :smack:

Thankfully, I managed to get rid of it before it caused any more problems. I’m surprised Avast hasn’t freaked out at me yet.

20

Holy rolling hell. That was way worse than I thought. Half an hour and I think it had stalled, but I couldn’t do anything in Firefox because whatever it was doing was occupying all of its attention. I can say Firefox was using 288 megs of RAM (it was using 88 megs prior to loading Bella’s site) and was fully and perpetually occupying one of my cores to the exclusion of all else. I couldn’t take it anymore so I killed the process and reloaded Firefox, making sure to kill Bella’s site before it had a chance to load again.

And that was without it loading whatever it was asking me to install a plugin for, which I wasn’t going to do.

I had been hoping it would complete loading so I could stitch together captures of the entire site into one big-ass image file, but in the end it ceased being worth the bother.