My Soul is Weak and Damaged
2003-10-28 � 10:47 a.m.

I used to believe that the ugliest, most difficult to navigate and overall most unpleasant to interact with websites on the 'net were the "Welcme to Jennys Home Page!!!1!1" personal pages of people who had just discovered that they could use Word to create HTML — these are the pages with the excessive animated .GIFs (usually at poor resolution), overpowering and badly tiled background images, and plenty of other useless web gizmos like animated cursors, MIDI files of about fifteen seconds of "Bohemian Rhapsody" playing over and over, and bad poetry scrolling through the status bar of your browser.

But I was wrong.

As bad as those pages are, they have...charm, of a sort. They're earnest, if you know what I mean. Those people (and I was one of them, once, though I never forced "Bohemian Rhapsody" on anybody) are in the process of learning something. Maybe something important, maybe not, but learning something nontheless.

Besides, I have discovered a far more hideous and soul-draining category of webpage, and that is the Generic Store webpage.

You know the ones I mean. Despite the fact that they are all laid out differently, they all look the same. Your mind rebels at taking in any information from them, because they are trying so hard to force such a huge quantity of it down your throat that it's just offensive.

They are essentially lists. Lists of crap to buy. And it's all the SAME crap.

And no matter how hard they try, you can tell that it's just not a professional operation. It's the equivalent of a Mom and Pop Shop on the net.

Part of my current job is that I have to look at these lifeless, supremely dull pages all day long. Quite often I find myself in the position of having to give advice to the operators of these pages about how they might be able to better convert the visitors they get into customers. Usually, my advice is something along the lines of "Stop sucking."

Yeah — I've got to get a different job.

-t

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