With all the hullabaloo over medical reform in the U.S., you might wonder what health care looks like in other parts of the world. At this hospital in Japan, your care comes with a healthy side order of flashing, blinking Lucky Cats, and a prescription strength dose of animated gifs.

Warning: If you're epileptic, we take no responsibility for what may happen if you click to view this Fugly Friday. And, for once, we're really not joking.

Granted, I don't read Kanji, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that this site is in need of some time in the emergency room. Even if the visible text were eloquent and poignant -- and I could read Japanese -- the overwhelming and incredibly inappropriate use of crazy color combos, frames and the dreaded solid black background of doom makes this a Fugly Friday to remember -- and avoid.

Before there was anything today's Internet users would think of as "web design," there was GeoCities. The homepage service that let absolutely anyone try his or her hand at putting something on the Internet is also one of the cradles of contemporary Web Fugly. In fact, Fugly Friday owes such a debt to the GeoCities aesthetic that this week's installment is going to take a trip down memory lane to look at some early innovations in tearing a human being's eye out using pure HTML.

Today's fugly site, HTML Advanced Tricks & Tips, is a cookbook for everything that make GeoCities sites painful to look at. Tables! Frames! Scrolling marquee text! I will grant you that some people continue to defend tables to this day, but I don't think anyone is defending those animated flame GIFs. Good luck navigating this page by clicking on the text: it's not linked. You're not going anywhere unless you click on those dancing flames. Maybe that's a secret you learn from the "HTML Writer's Guild" once they give you a cool badge like the one on this homepage.

As for the tips themselves? Closing your tags is still decent advice, and cropping and shrinking your graphics was a necessity back in the low-bandwidth heyday of GeoCities. These tips were actually not terrible at the time, but the author has to mess it up by slapping on animated GIFs and encouraging the use of the marquee tag. Between those two, we've covered most of what made every GeoCities page so terrible. Add an autoplaying midi and you'd have a Fugly Tutorial Trifecta.

(This post was made possible by Reocities, a GeoCities rescue attempt that backed up 600,000 pages of potential fugly before Yahoo! shut off GeoCities' animated flashing lights for good.)

	Fugly Friday: Cybertown Do you tire of your humdrum, meatspace world? Does Sony's PlayStation Home look too real? Are there too many flying penises in Second Life for your taste? Well, strap on your hippie goggles and...		Fugly Friday : Yvette's Bridal My optometrist was insistent that I not remove the bandages for another 24 hours. He also said I might have done less damage to myself if, instead of searching for today's Fugly Friday, I'd tried...
	Fugly Friday: Old school website atrocities from Microsoft Back when I graduated high school, most websites hadn't begun thinking about design terms like glossy, grungy, or even "not a complete trainwreck." Heck, plenty of them didn't give aesthetics a...	Other Fugly we liked Fugly Friday : MSY Technology Fugly Friday : Bannock County Bluegrass Festival Fugly Friday - Twitter design disasters

The doctors all say my cornea are healing nicely, and I should be back to cursing and screaming at poor design within the week, although my insurance company did ask that I take our a new rider for something they call "Ocular Occupational Hazards."

Whatevs. They's just a bunch of haters, yo.

Fugly Friday returns next week with new highs about all the lows out there in the dark dusty corners of the web. Until then, enjoy this look back at a few of our favorite Fugly Friday finds so far.

Oh Idaho. We love your delicious baking potatoes, the mouth feel we get when we say "Boise", and, uh, whatever the third thing to love about Idaho might be. In any event, that third thing to love about Idaho probably isn't quality web design.

Poor layout, dancing graphics, overuse of capital letters; I've learned to forgive quite a bit. What bothers me most about Bannock County Bluegrass Festival is their complete and utter disrespect for the trichromacy of the human eye. Purple, Cyan and Green should never have existed in the same universe, much less a single web page.

In fact, the only single point upon which those three colors should converge is in a low-rent stripper's eye makeup. As Marge Simpson's mother once said, "Ladies pinch. Whores use rouge."

Nevertheless, if you happen to be near Pocatello, Idaho this weekend -- and I'm sure you must have your reasons. S'ok, we won't question your judgment -- check out some Bluegrass and beer. But, if you run into this guy, for the sake of everything holy and decent, please offer to buy him a color wheel.

[Thanks Peter!]

My optometrist was insistent that I not remove the bandages for another 24 hours. He also said I might have done less damage to myself if, instead of searching for today's Fugly Friday, I'd tried something safer like scouring my own eyes with a gentle bath of rock salt. He also said something about a fork. As I laughed, encased in my world of darkness and unable to see his face, a chill came over the room and I suddenly realized he wasn't joking.

So, before clicking on the misery that is Yvette's Bridal, just remember, you've been warned. According to the source, Yvette's was crafted (or rather, bludgeoned) into existence using Yahoo SiteBuilder. Once my eyes heal completely, I'll be mounting a campaign to have SiteBuilder banned as a dangerous munition.

From what I'm told, in more socially conscious jurisdictions, possession of SiteBuilder is already highly criminalized, or at least relegated to downtrodden neighborhoods where it can be segregated from productive society. Sure, they provide prophylactic templates -- and many of them don't take visual assault to an aggravated degree -- but, given SiteBuilder is capable of constructing maliciously eye-gouging wonders like Yvette's, it should at the very least require a background check, and a three day waiting period before you're allowed to download.

Nowadays, what with the internet and all, you can pretty much pick up "good" (read: adequate) design for free and all over the place. There are templates for EZ, no-bake websites to beat the band. But Twitter's oddball format doesn't lend itself to much more than a blurb in terms of customization. That doesn't mean people won't maximize that space.

There are also folks butchering the design, but maybe it's not their fault. Twitter isn't really designed to be designed -- the profiles are mere vanity. You're looking at them when you tweet, and relying on people to visit them and give you a 3 second verdict to follow or unfollow (coming to NBC this Fall).

Here's a few interesting specimens we found:

• HotTweeps - Nothing says quality like improper use of Photoshop's magic wand.
• shawnshewchuk - Whoa dude, your logo is like, totally huge.
• DavidLetterman - Even if Dave approved of Twitter, he'd disapprove of the animated GIF in the profile pic. Careful he doesn't sue the Worldwide Pants off of you.
• Now here's YGrab, who AAAAH, my eyes! Who says you can't mix orange and blue? Over and over. No repeating backgrounds, ever!
  
• Here's one of zillions of those "gonna put all my info in the rail" designs. Be selective, people.
• Maybe this isn't a design thing, maybe it's just a thing where we haven't been typing in all caps on the internet for about a decade, but this guy needs to cut it out.
• If it's self-indulgence you wish to see, but you're burnt on celeb tweets, may we suggest Twouchebags? Aside from being a great name for a band or bar, it's a good resource for, well, people whose behaviors might make cause them to be labeled something rhyming with Twouchebags.

Finally there's the leeches and remoras of the Twitter landscape, all those "get a zillion followers and die rich!" sites. Funny this is, most of them don't show their Twitter account names ON their site. Inspired Magazine has a pretty funny roundup of these jokers.

Sometimes you're presented with something so illustrative of a concept that it stands completely on its own. For example, if I wanted to present the concept of bad music to someone, I could simply mail them a copy of Miley Cyrus' latest album. Without presenting any supporting evidence or explanation, the message would be universally received. The Most Amazing Website On The Internet is much the same for the concept of smart-ass high-school students forced to take an HTML class..

The site -- apparently designed in answer to a school project which offered no concern as to visual appeal, or safety for epileptics -- nails the concept. An auto-starting MIDI file, dancing cats, an oddly disembodied and highly mobile Mel Gibson, and a (late season) full cast photo from Full House are all used to spectacular effect.

Regular readers of Fugly Friday might accuse me of taking the easy way out this week. Hitting a low hanging piece of fruit with a cheap shot before turning to run. I beg to differ with those naysayers and hand-wringers. This is indeed low hanging fruit, but it also may be the absolute ugliest site on the web, and that in and of itself is an amazingly difficult task.

Click through. I dare you. But first, let me warn; There are some things in life that, once seen, cannot be unseen.

[Thanks to Oldmanhorton for the tip]

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.

Unfortunately the stout folks at Guinness don't have a "World's Worst Website" category (best I could find was the worst mouse plague, which I assume happens frequently in schools). Fear not, as one intrepid designer has endeavored to show by way of example; I give you the "World's Worst Website," and oh boy, does it deliver.

Pretty much every web design sin in the book is covered, from hosting with Angelfire, to using frames, marquee text, blinking backgrounds, misspellings, links to dead-end pages and much, much more. Try turning your sound all the way up before visiting, then run.

This appears to be created by Michelle from Gold Nugget Webs, a site that isn't exactly fugly, but isn't going to win any awards, either. In fact, it appears Michelle has a thing for understated design, opting to choose aliased text, pixelated JPEG's and CAPS LOCK. To be fair, I get the feeling her clients aren't the most web-savvy or design-savvy bunch (do you know of an opal mine that Starck designed?), so what you see could be at the client's request. And I've certainly had the experience of a client demanding something that made you want to retch. Still, as a monument to fugliness, Michelle's "Worst Website" is easily in the top 10.