Worst Web Sites 2008

It's perfectly OK for music, movie, art, experimental, and personal sites to use whatever type of navigation they want because they're interested in being cool/trendy or whatever the current term may be. They're really not interested in selling products or disseminating information — or they wouldn't use MMN. Just because these sites are "permitted" to use MMN, doesn't mean you should.

America's Web Site reminds you once again to "Design for your audience."

Today's Daily Sucker actually, isn't a sucker for its intended audience — Kids Today — but the problem is it uses certain bad web design techniques that could creep into everyday business web sites. The site is for a band called Coldplay as a promtion for one of their albums. Here's the e-mail.

Firstly, a big hello from the UK and thanks for doing what you do! Anyway, enough with the flattery. I've e-mailed you for a reason: I think I have found, possibly, one of the worst web sites on the internet.

This isn't your standard Geocities homepage effort. If it were, it would be half-excusable. In fact, it is almost expected that these web sites are of a poor quality institutions as it were, like burgers in America and the Queen over here. After all, does it really matter if sites documenting the 1995 fishing trip with Uncle Mike, or the entire episode guide to the Simpsons, are impeccably designed? Of course not.

It does however, become slightly worrying when one of the most successful British bands in recent days, Coldplay, releases such a terrifyingly shocking web site to document their pivotal new album.

Note: You have to hover over the tiny polygons to navigate it is up to you to find which polygons are actually navigation buttons. Tip, use the Tab key on the keyboard!

Could this be the most laughable and dumb-founded, yet irritatingly hopeless use of Mystery Meat Navigation out there on the world wide web? I d like to think so if there were anything worse than this, I would seriously begin to consider counseling.

There is so much wrong with this web site it's untrue. Of course, the web site doesn't validate as valid HTML of any sorts either.

You may think I am being a tad over the top and curiously obsessive in my views towards this web site. Maybe I am, however in my eyes, the web site is almost completely unusable contradictory to the Geocities homepages I mentioned earlier, most of which are perfectly useable. May I inform you that the A Rush Of Blood To The Head.co.uk web site was promoted on television adverts, posters, publicity campaigns and on the CD album.

It infuriates me that such a web site can actually be put live, without someone thinking "Wait a minute, the arty-head thing looks good on the web site but how the hell do users actually find the content!?"

I can't really argue except to say that the site was...shudder..."designed for its audience."

"Well, Vincent, if that's the case, why even mention the site?" Because, I swear to God, some major corporation will use something equally stupid on their site. Oh, they day already came and went — Qualcomm.

Rush of Blood to the Head
Because it's so hard to figure out where the links are, here's a cheat sheat

What is Mystery Meat?

A very successful movie has a very MMN system. By the way, is there any movie Web site (besides Blair Witch Project) that's worth the time to visit? I've never seen better looking sites that had no content. The Matrix.

Fight Club = MMN.

As the person who suggested the site stated: "I'm not sure what they are trying to prove here, but it doesn't convince me to go see the movie." Fight Club = MMN.

She gives me hope. Ah, the lovely songstress who gave hope to drummers throughout the world (she married her drummer). As the person who suggested this site stated: "As much as I love Sarah McLachlan, her Web page is sadly akin to deep sea diving without the oxygen." Here's "most" of the home page from Archive.org.

It's been fixed — a wonderful sign. A musician who understands the importance of communicating with their audience. Sarah McLachlan.

Perfectly done Mystery Meat.

It's a band site and as I've always said, band sites don't have to make sense or be usable — even when they're selling products. It's the nature of band sites to be extreme and nonsensical — a 354,574 byte home page is certainly nonsensical.

It's well-done, but so what? A Perfect Circle

Huh? I don't get it.

As the person who suggested this site stated:

The above site is an experimental art site, so it's a bit unfair to label it Mystery Meat seeing as they're not selling anything, and to some extent getting lost is part of the fun. But, for instance, this site hosts experimental real audio files (mostly seeming to consist of five minutes of static with the occasional bleep inserted). So, if I wanted to go back and find a ram file that I'd thought was interesting, I'd have a bugger of a time finding it. At least most of the corporate Saturnic sites have rollovers that reveal what the thing leads to - this site has fancy names like 'epistemology' and 'radio telemetry'. It's hard to decode what pages lead to the sound files that you want to hear once you've worked out what the hell the site is about. The page called 'forking map' is only a map to the extent that all of the symbols appear on it. It's completely forked.

Radioqualia

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Coda