Ugliest site of the month, plus44.com
17 December 2004
2 comments
Web development
http://www.plus44.com
I actually feel bad about complaining about this website because it's a vast bank of information about England written by a single person called Philip Davidson. According to his website, he's composed some 3000 pages! I guess all have been done with state of the art Microsoft Frontpage 0.1, MS Paint and Netscape 2.0.
The reason I genuinely dislike looking at this website is that all pages seem to be very different. There's not consistency and you constantly fear that you've left the site without noticing it. A quick glance on the URL before you panic assures you you can remove the cursor from the back button. The front page has five animations inclusive an animated background that can probably cause damage to your eyes. Be careful!
The site also features frames that scroll forever and hides parts of the navigation. On this page there's a picture which is the word "RETURN"; next to it is an explanation what that says you can press it to return to the main page. What's the point then of having the image if you have to explain it? On some pages there's a nav at the bottom with the headline: "Transfer to:". Since when do you transfer between different pages on one site? Some pages surprisingly open new windows with no apparent reason. Be careful!
Comments
Hmm interesting. I haven't looked at plus44 for quite a long time. It was written in the summer on 1997 on a very old mac using claris home page. Although it looks hopelessly out of date now it was at the time quite innovative and many 1000's of sites copied ideas from it. At the time there was really nothing on the web like it and I got daily emails from univerisities around the world asking if they could use it as a demo about England in classes. Nato asked if he it could be used for training U.S. forces, it was the firts website to be put on webwise. Througout all this I never made any money out of it and never had the impetutus to update it. I got 1000's of emails to keep it so I did. I did have a plan that would have made some money out of it and it could have been very cutting edge had it not been for a so called friend and programmer who was meant to help develop it but actually hihacked my whole idea and did it himself. It was somehow well embedded in search engines and although I haven't actually really looked at it for over five years it still receives an enormous amount of hits - so I gingerly pay my yearly isp fees in that some day something may happen to it. I now make films and might in the next few months turn it into a film website. So there you go.
good monei