Is this the worst website ever made? | Hacker News Reader

Is this the worst website ever made?

fabricland.co.uk

18 pointswhyleyc24 comments

No. Yvette's Bridal Formal was the worst ever made, as others have noted. Sadly, it is gone. A site with a similar feel is http://www.thecountrycupboardtoo.com/

If Yvette's was a 10 on the badness scale, that one is only a 6, but it gets the point across.

The Wayback Machine knows all, tells all:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110718150425/http://yvettesbrid...

Amazing site - actually reminds me a little of the Million Dollar homepage :)

If Hacker News stays the same, it may be a contender in a few years. It's starting to look like the Craigslist of social news sites.

Geez, many major Japanese retailers' websites are far worse...

e.g. Bic Camera (market cap $70 billion): http://www.biccamera.com

The basic design goal of Japanese retail sites seems to be "complete visual overload" (stun your customers into buying?)...

[Come to think of it, this rather matches their physical stores, but it's a lot more annoying crammed in your browser... in a store, it's kind of fun...]

Click on the links on the left frame and be prepared to be blown away by the load speed. Better than anything most programmers can achieve.

No external css, no javascript that I can see, and probably no database backend or dynamic templates. Just plain old school html files. A visual abomination but also, yeah, lightning fast and robust. Unintentionally a good argument for the KISS principle.

And if it's been making money for its owners with this code for this long, how hard can we really laugh at it? It seems to be working for them. Shame about the yellow though.

I think this one has it beat: http://www.bountytowels.com

I really love this one http://www.samirnasri.fr/

as an online marketer that actually creates revenue as opposed to 95% of HN readers that have unprofitable startups. These sites arent bad at all. Just because they arent resposive and dont have jquery or whatever junk dosent make them bad.

Just because a site makes money doesn't make it good. Think about how much more they could make if they actually invested in a half-decent web presence.

My housemate used this site recently to try and order some stuff and was almost reduced to tears !

On the contrary: Just because a website doesn't look good, doesn't make it bad. To me, the website presents all the information it needs to: the products they stock, their price and where to get them.

Not every business wants to become internet only. Or, for that note, even have a website in the first place. There are plenty of perfectly profitable businesses that don't. Both staff and customers often value the human interactions a physical store brings. They may make more money with a "half-decent web presence" (might not!) but their business will be reduced to one of simple order fulfilment and lose the what makes running the business enjoyable in the first place. Fabricland has a shop in the town we live. My (non internet using) wife goes there often and appreciates their great service. If they went internet only she would lose this and have to go elsewhere, though I don't know where.

By the way, for your housemate, ordering instructions are there on the front page: "TO ORDER PLEASE CALL US WITH YOUR CREDIT/ SWITCH/ DEBIT CARD DETAILS, WE ARE WAITING TO TAKE YOUR CALL! [...] NO SHOPPING BASKET, JUST CALL PLEASE" It's not as convenient as clicking an item into your shopping basket and paying by paypal, granted, but it's not too difficult either (though does involve talking to someone).

I'm not suggesting that they should go internet-only, just that they may want to consider making their website ... consistent and readable ?

I don't care that they don't have shopping carts, or "buy now" buttons, or online payments, or shipping calculators, or modern web technologies, or nice image carousels.

I do care that I can't read some of their pages, that there are basic spelling errors on the homepage, that they have no search box, that products are hard to find, and that certain image thumbnails are so small and badly shot as to render them useless.

It's great that they are running a business they enjoy, and promoting face-to-face contact with customers (more should), but it's not an excuse for incompetency.

Whether they like it or not the website is an advert for their business, and in it's current state it looks like they're advertising a half-digested pizza, vomitted onto the pavement by a demented baboon.

Perhaps, but then it was written by the owner of the company. She would probably consider my attempts to identify and cut fabric just as poor :) OK it's not up to professional standards, but perhaps the target audience doesn't care?

No, Yvette's Bridal Formal was the worst ever made. Sadly it has passed on. Google it, have a look at the images. Then imagine a collection of midi music playing at the same time.

Try http://www.lostateminor.com/2012/01/05/yvettes-bridal-formal...

For some reason I like this page of a local group of the german party SPD: http://www.spd-engenhahn.de/

While scrolling down the tabled, framed, left side "menu", I had a visceral feeling of reminiscence and nostalgia of roughly 1998, when I started playing with HTML.

Amazing.

Patio11, what percent conversion optimization do you think you could gain them with a few strategic A/B tests?

No, it does its job. If I were a customer, I'd be able to find what I wanted. Yes it's ugly, of course.

My housemate couldn't find what she wanted despite being an art technician.

- No search - Items placed in bizarre categories - Pages with 404s

Fail.

http://arngren.net/ is also pretty horrible.

not even close - I can read everything on the site - I might need to put on two pairs of sunglasses, but there are lots worse - any site with a tiled background image for starters...

Or can you beat it ? :)

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