Download Squad

You know, the reason we do these is in part to educate, in part to entertain, and in no small part because we just find the weirdest stuff on the web and must share it. Like the old Ellen Degeneres joke, "here, this tastes awful, try some!" With that in mind, take a moment to view Welkom op de site van Willy's & Marjetten. Yes, fugly comes in many flavors and languages. In this case, it's Flemish. Read the hilarious Google translation here.*

When you are done wiping the blood from your eyeballs, let's discuss this atrocity, shall we? First off, clearly the gods of GIF smiled upon this site, as we see so often in the fugly department. Look at all those animations, bouncing around and not really doing anything but causing cognitive dissonance. So that's where my migraine came from!

Willy's page isn't all bad, however. Instead of using bgsound or autoplaying a media file, there's an auto-play Flash button which plays some truly atrocious music. But at least you can turn it off. That's a plus.

I should also mention Willy's not entirely living in the stone ages where design is concerned. While I found this page on a hunt for FrontPage atrocities (FrontPage being wanted for browser war crimes, and increasingly tough to track down), the site appears to have eschewed the old FP template for... CSS! Yep, I found a stylesheet attached to the page. Unfortunately the only thing it is used for: setting the font to Marker Felt. Cue the sad trombone. Yeah, the page is otherwise a mess of <td>'s, which makes babies cry.

*Epilogue: I hear this page was supposed to be set up as an example of bad 90's web design. And, in fact, it was built for a Flemish TV series called Willy's en Marjetten. So it would seem the fugly was all in the name of parody. Note that, at the end of the series, all the characters died. Bad design kills, kids, so stay off FrontPage and stay in design school. That said, how many real and serious sites still look like this? Send us your answers in the comments.