dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

The old saw says the only certain things in life are death and taxes. Well, I now feel confident enough to add “requests on Yahoo! Answers to review awful Web sites.”

I’ve been participating in Yahoo! Answers for about a year now, and in that time, I’ve seen hundreds of requests from people to review their Web sites.

Without fail, they’re all God-awful. I don’t mean just ugly, or poorly executed, or incomplete, or silly; I mean, genuine affronts to aesthetics and intelligence.

Here are some examples. Brace yourself.

What do you think about my web page.?

Here’s the link
Singhgagand.brinkster.net
plese copy and paste to the browser or I get a viloation if i type

Here’s another truism I have discovered of Yahoo! Answers: The more ludicrous the request, the more likely the requester is from India or Pakistan. Perhaps language limitations make what would otherwise be sensible questions seem outlandish; but more often than not, the more laughable the question, the more likely it comes from Asia Minor.

Anyway, I saved a copy of the abortion this kid wanted reviewed. Again, only click on the link if you have a strong stomach.

So, I decided to see if maybe, not all Web sites up for review on Yahoo! Answers are criminal acts against nature. So, I searched for “What do you think of my Web site” in the search function of Yahoo! Answers. These are the top sites I could retrieve from that search, and they are all bad.

There’s this one:

What do you think of my web site?
http://theenchantedisabella.tripod….

I tried to download this one so I could post it here, but it’s such a piece of jumbled crap, my bot kept crashing trying to get all the ludicrously oversized unicorn and pegasus and all other forms of fantasy-nonsense images to which this dimwit linked.

So, you’ll just have to hope this link still works. Be prepared; it will take a long time to load, even if you have broadband. [At least the knucklehead above managed not to mask his navigation, so I suppose in the Web Special Olympics, so far, he's the champion.]

What do you think of my web site?

allformommy.com

Just think: Someone spent at least $5 for a domain name for this turd of a site. This page is so bad, the Google AdSense code can’t even make sense of it.

And to top it off, she voted as “best answer” the only person who didn’t point out the site is a turd. Pretty funny.

What do you think of my web site? Thank you to answer?

http://donpedrospanishschool.com…

You know you’re dealing with awful Web site design when you’re glad to see something that lines up properly, doesn’t have broken links and uses art that makes sense to the content on the page.

This site is OK — for 1999. It’s too dark; the dark text on a dark background is difficult to read. There are also some padding problems among the elements. For mediocre, it’s the cream of the crop in Yahoo! Answers Land.

Being Great Is Just An Inch Away From Being Good Enough

Which reminds me of Christmas shopping with my parents at the local Circuit City. I think Circuit City is probably the worst big-box retailer on Earth: No selection, no service, the most uninformed sales staff available, what they carry is crap and it’s often overpriced. Best Buy is vastly preferable.

The Circuit City store in Augusta, Maine is awful. It’s about 60,000 square feet, but it has no selection whatsoever. You can’t find relatively common CD titles, such as anything by Jamiroquai, or relatively common DVD titles, such as The Ice Princess or Roll Bounce (my niece wanted them; she’s 12). [Sure enough, I checked via the Circuit City Web site, and today, you have to buy those items via Web; they aren't available for pickup at the local store. So what's the purpose behind having a DVD or CD section if you can't even stock new stuff?]

If you don’t have what I am looking for, I simply won’t shop there; that’s the easy solution. But they did have things my parents wanted to buy, so I went there about four times over the holiday shopping season.

The funniest thing was having the sales associates try to up-sell me. I try to be patient around nincompoops, but I am gravely irritated by the spreading of ignorance, and almost invariably, an associate is going to say something to me that is simply retarded. My vitriol against people spreading misinformation is so bad, I correct sales clerks talking to other customers.

As a result, I tend to scowl when in electronics stores, because I’m trying to ward off assistance that will only insult me. But on a recent trip to Circuit City with my dad, a sales clerk tried to upsell me on — of all things — a VCR. Seriously. He was quickly dismissed.

We then couldn’t get anyone to retrieve what we did want, nor to deliver the items to us in a timely fashion.

Which all leads to two points:

• Showing up is 90 percent of success. Or, you don’t have to be very good to be better than most people.
• If you try, even a little bit, you’ll succeed.

Which you can see in these Web sites. Your site doesn’t have to be very good to be a lot better than most, and as long as you sincerely try to improve, you’ll be better off than most people, who are simply phoning it in.