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The Art of the Bad Web Site
Whew! now that you've made it through that mess, I'd like to give you my theories on exactly why pages like that exist.

I can do that.
You used to have to work to make a bad web page, but with today's HTML editing software, people have the ability to crank out dozens of ugly, broken pages a day. Just because you bought a book on HTML doesn't mean you can do it right.

Novelty for the sake of novelty.
Wow! Look at how cool frames look! I must be cool.
Um. no. Frames have little use. I will admit that I have used frames. They have 4 functional purposes (all of which are rare).
  1. Two documents need to be viewed simultaneously, and scroll at different rates.
  2. An example page from another site needs to be shown without leaving the current site.
  3. The viewer needs to be annoyed.
  4. The page needs to be difficult to print.
Frames not used to accomplish one of these are superfluous.

Everyone has a computer as cool as mine.
My page rocks! (as long as you extend your browser window out to the edge of your 21" monitor, which is set to 24 bit color - and you have your surround sound speakers turned on and have the bass boosted - and you're running a Sparc Ultra 170 or better - and you have a DS1 net connection)

Silly as this sounds, I can give names and numbers of design firms who assume that everyone is running a 17" monitor at 24 bit color depth (millions). Their pages look hideous (or are unviewable) with a 14 or 15" monitor running 256 colors. Not a smart move.

NEW!
This mindset has now found its way into clients' heads. I am annoyed at this latest development. Sure, I can make a site unviewable by 25% of the population but that looks good on a client's office computer.
Is it worth annoying the average internet user? NO! You want those users to have a positive impression of your site, not a 'Wow, this site might really look cool, if only I had better hardware' impression.

One parting note. If you are browsing the web on a 17+" monitor and your browser window is full screen, you are a freak. You should be able to fit at least 2 full browsers windows on your screen.
You should NEVER have to have your window out further than 640 pixels wide. If you do (are you listening shareware.com?), contact the web people at that site and yell at them - or, ask them for some money so you can buy a bigger monitor so you can view their site.

Browser-specific mania.
The browser developers need a lot of blame here. But just because they implemented the use of nonstandard (and useless) tags like 'Blink' and 'Marquee' doesn't mean they should be used.

Server dynamics.
I know this is going to shock most of you but I'm afraid it's the truth - The filenames foo.html and FOO.HTML are different. I know, you're stunned, but hear me out. The vast majority of http servers are running unix of some type. Unix is case sensitive. So if you've just developed a page on your PC, and are wondering why everything is broken, check and see if you're referencing the correct filenames. (That wasn't too condescending was it?)

Poor Taste.
There is no accounting for this.

A page can go on forever! (theoretically)
Just for reference, I think this page is too long. Pages that are 15 screens high (or larger) are plain silly. There are exceptions, but they are rare (hence exception).

The gif89a animation.
This one isn't going away. The animated gif adds visual interest, and is used (and misused) by nearly everyone. Here are some general rules to look at when building web pages:
  • Use animations that repeat in long intervals. Make sure it takes at least 8 seconds to play through the animation once.
  • Limit the total number of animations on a page to around 3. Large numbers of animations can prohibit browsers from retrieving the remainder of your page (they're too busy keeping up with the animations).
  • Keep 'em small. This goes for all images, but it can run rampant once you start animating. The animation should be no more than 3x that of a standard image of that size.
Someone thought this was cool.
Dr. Douglas de Lacey of Cambridge University used my really bad web page in a demonstration for a "Web Awareness Day".
It's great to know that I can make pages worse than anyone.
I don't get a lot of hits, but they're quality hits.
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