Ultimately better than you.

January 24, 2009

Pants: i D A R R Y L' [d0t] NET

I received an e-mail just after New Year, nominating today's Pants Award recipient. I still haven't decided what I'm actually going to do with the Pants series, so I was tempted to just delete the e-mail... and then I opened the website.

i D A R R Y L' [d0t] NET is... startling. I mean, not just the fact the owner obviously thinks he looks cool giving everyone the finger, but it's such a jumble of different styles and colours. The "layout" is actually a huge, slow-loading png and believe it or not, the sidebar/content offset is intentional! (C.R.A.P - the A stands for Alignment for a reason.)

The welcome message proudly states:

I Think You Should Know That My Site Get Over 50-100 Unique Hits Daily

...but I'm not entirely sure why — 50-100 isn't a high number. Kudos and all, but everyone knows that if you're going to brag about something, you should at least make sure it's worth bragging about first. Maybe when there's a few more zeros on that figure I'll be impressed.

The entire site is Typed Like This; I find it tedious to read for more than a few seconds at a time. I lost count of the amount of spelling errors I saw before even leaving the front page... "Resgister", "Alot", "exists" (exits), "Walpapers". Underlined, bold and italic text are all randomly styled and I quickly gave up on finding links by scanning through — I was left having to hover over every piece of coloured and underlined text to double-check.

In the text under the title "WebMaster" I read with interest that the owner's mum is a lawyer and his dad a judge. It begs the question, then, why he feels he can get away with distributing music and videos via his "imusic" subdomain — blatant copyright infringement. For a talented boy (his words) that's a pretty stupid decision.

The "content" is just as bad as the layout. Typical "HTML Help": textareas, deprecated tags and inline styles. Badly edited celebrity photographs for which credit is demanded. The About page is littered in egotistical bullshit — enough to put my tagline to shame — and contadicts other text on the site ("Im Straight And Single" -> "currenlty taken by someone of 2 years")

The coding is littered with font tags, <center> and <u>; header tags are used but for text that couldn't even be remotely classed as a header; 4-5 pointless JavaScript snippets adding to the bulk; constant repeated properties in the CSS (what happened to the cascade part of CSS?); two body tags; and unnecessary absolute positioning.

Darryl: you seem like a sweet boy, but this "gangster"/"cool dude" attitude makes you look like a plonker. You're bragging about content that everyone else has already done better, and a design that really doesn't do your so-called 3 years experience credit. If you're going to offer resources to your visitors, you owe it to them to do it properly. For not even trying, you get the 15th Pants Award:

Stop listening to your kiss-ass commenters and sort your site out.

Tagged pants · 62 Comments

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