Every week, I abuse myself for your amusement by seeking out yet another horribly constructed web site and poking fun at its awfulness. Doctors and Optometrists write in each week to warn of the damage I'm doing to myself. My shrink is buying a new beach house on the expected revenue to be generated by my nervous breakdown. But still -- glutton for punishment that I am -- I continue to seek the holy grail of websuck.

This week's bin of bargains brought me to MSY Technology (Pty. LTD.. whatever that means). MSY will probably never top a greatest hits list of horrible websites -- with a total lack of dancing house pets, no click the Mel Gibson games, and colors that won't cause psychotic episodes. Those are the nicest possible things you can write about them, in every other respect MSY is awash in sin.

Take this price list for example. If you can make it through 2 colorful stanzas without clawing at your own eyeballs, you're a braver man than I.

by the time you scroll through the second page, you're asking God to bring on the E-bomb to mercifully send us back to paper, quills and candlelight.

Somehow, the marketing genius who crafted this abomination in Microsoft Word felt you'd have the stamina to endure twelve whole pages. That's twelve pages of nearly random font size changes, the word "HOT" next to every line item, and an entire page of warnings, disclaimers, addendum and notes in prologue. By the time you scroll through page one, you've forgotten what you were looking for -- and, by the time you scroll through the second page, you're asking God to bring on the E-bomb to mercifully send us back to paper, quills and candlelight.

What's worse? Customers on one Australian review site not only call MSY untrustworthy, unhelpful, filthy and even downright rude but -- one reviewer warns -- if you call them asking for prices, they'll refer you to their website!

Have faith, Fugly Friday Fan. If there is a just and righteous God in our midst, then certainly there is a giant gift basket of FAIL waiting for MSY's web author on his arrival in hell.

[Via Digg, circa 2006]

I didn't think it was possible to fall out of the ugly tree and actually hit every branch on the way down. I thought that was just a figure of speech. One of those idiomatic expressions we use to describe something without really describing it. The Solutions Network proved I have a thing or two to learn about metaphors.

Imagine a site so jumbled with affiliate links, so riddled with primary colors, so overbearing in its use of tables -- filling every last inch of visible space with something you could click on, NOW! -- that any pretense of goodwill towards your fellow man you've ever held evaporates like so much dew from the top layer of a landfill in the morning sun.

It's a trainwreck of html, a prank played entirely in font tags. It simply must be.

The only thing the designer failed to use is BLINK. I'm going to guess that failure was either an intentional oversight -- one tiny concession to good taste in a sea of disgust -- or that he was so overwhelmed by the site himself that he fell dead at the keyboard before adding that one last cardinal sin of bad web design.

But wait, there's more. Immediately after your browser loads the last site you'll ever want to visit, a voice comes booming from your speakers, proclaiming that you've reached "the busiest site on the internet!" The irony is nearly enough to kill a man.

The cherry on top? Even the favicon is animated. I'm not even sure how you'd go about animating a favicon. You know why I'm not sure? Because, even without seeing an example of an animated favicon, my brain attempts to suck my own eyeballs deep within the recesses of my skull upon the very mention -- a physiological response I can only imagine was developed through generations of evolutionary genius as a last-ditch defense mechanism to prevent serious brain damage from spreading among the population.

If The Solutions Network is your personal key to making money on the internets, I highly reccomend that you begin scouting for a sturdy cardboard box in which to live at your earliest opportunity.

[Thanks Andrew for the tip. My shrink will be sending you the bill for my next 3 visits]