Is this the worst website ever made?

http://www.fabricland.co.uk/

by whyleyc • 14 years ago

18 24 14 years ago

fabricland.co.uk

whyleyc5• 14 years ago

Or can you beat it ? :)

rubbra2• 14 years ago

No, Yvette's Bridal Formal was the worst ever made. Sadly it has passed on. Google it, have a look at the images. Then imagine a collection of midi music playing at the same time.

rubbra2• 14 years ago

Try http://www.lostateminor.com/2012/01/05/yvettes-bridal-formal...

Doublon• 14 years ago

I really love this one http://www.samirnasri.fr/

diego• 14 years ago

If Hacker News stays the same, it may be a contender in a few years. It's starting to look like the Craigslist of social news sites.

graeme• 14 years ago

Patio11, what percent conversion optimization do you think you could gain them with a few strategic A/B tests?

afaasap• 14 years ago

For some reason I like this page of a local group of the german party SPD: http://www.spd-engenhahn.de/

gushie• 14 years ago

Perhaps, but then it was written by the owner of the company. She would probably consider my attempts to identify and cut fabric just as poor :) OK it's not up to professional standards, but perhaps the target audience doesn't care?

roschdal• 14 years ago

http://arngren.net/ is also pretty horrible.

tzs• 14 years ago

No. Yvette's Bridal Formal was the worst ever made, as others have noted. Sadly, it is gone. A site with a similar feel is http://www.thecountrycupboardtoo.com/

If Yvette's was a 10 on the badness scale, that one is only a 6, but it gets the point across.

Turing_Machine• 14 years ago

The Wayback Machine knows all, tells all:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110718150425/http://yvettesbrid...

whyleyc5• 14 years ago

Amazing site - actually reminds me a little of the Million Dollar homepage :)

skyrimchicken• 14 years ago

Click on the links on the left frame and be prepared to be blown away by the load speed. Better than anything most programmers can achieve.

krapp• 14 years ago

No external css, no javascript that I can see, and probably no database backend or dynamic templates. Just plain old school html files. A visual abomination but also, yeah, lightning fast and robust. Unintentionally a good argument for the KISS principle.

And if it's been making money for its owners with this code for this long, how hard can we really laugh at it? It seems to be working for them. Shame about the yellow though.

madd_o• 14 years ago

While scrolling down the tabled, framed, left side "menu", I had a visceral feeling of reminiscence and nostalgia of roughly 1998, when I started playing with HTML.

Amazing.

nxnnxn• 14 years ago

not even close - I can read everything on the site - I might need to put on two pairs of sunglasses, but there are lots worse - any site with a tiled background image for starters...

snogglethorpe• 14 years ago

Geez, many major Japanese retailers' websites are far worse...

e.g. Bic Camera (market cap $70 billion): http://www.biccamera.com

The basic design goal of Japanese retail sites seems to be "complete visual overload" (stun your customers into buying?)...

[Come to think of it, this rather matches their physical stores, but it's a lot more annoying crammed in your browser... in a store, it's kind of fun...]

johnpolacek• 14 years ago

I think this one has it beat: http://www.bountytowels.com

BigNuts• 14 years ago

as an online marketer that actually creates revenue as opposed to 95% of HN readers that have unprofitable startups. These sites arent bad at all. Just because they arent resposive and dont have jquery or whatever junk dosent make them bad.

whyleyc5• 14 years ago

Just because a site makes money doesn't make it good. Think about how much more they could make if they actually invested in a half-decent web presence.

My housemate used this site recently to try and order some stuff and was almost reduced to tears !

tnai• 14 years ago

On the contrary: Just because a website doesn't look good, doesn't make it bad. To me, the website presents all the information it needs to: the products they stock, their price and where to get them.

Not every business wants to become internet only. Or, for that note, even have a website in the first place. There are plenty of perfectly profitable businesses that don't. Both staff and customers often value the human interactions a physical store brings. They may make more money with a "half-decent web presence" (might not!) but their business will be reduced to one of simple order fulfilment and lose the what makes running the business enjoyable in the first place. Fabricland has a shop in the town we live. My (non internet using) wife goes there often and appreciates their great service. If they went internet only she would lose this and have to go elsewhere, though I don't know where.

By the way, for your housemate, ordering instructions are there on the front page: "TO ORDER PLEASE CALL US WITH YOUR CREDIT/ SWITCH/ DEBIT CARD DETAILS, WE ARE WAITING TO TAKE YOUR CALL! [...] NO SHOPPING BASKET, JUST CALL PLEASE" It's not as convenient as clicking an item into your shopping basket and paying by paypal, granted, but it's not too difficult either (though does involve talking to someone).

andyrubio• 14 years ago

No, it does its job. If I were a customer, I'd be able to find what I wanted. Yes it's ugly, of course.

whyleyc5• 14 years ago

My housemate couldn't find what she wanted despite being an art technician.

- No search - Items placed in bizarre categories - Pages with 404s

Fail.

Is this the worst website ever made?

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