The true goal in this exercise is to weed out the weak — the people who visit your website for such base needs as “content”. There’s an art to web design that some people just can’t appreciate on its own. These people need to be lost if you are to be a true artist, and my studies have shown that there is no better way to do so than to ruin your website with the following tips:

5. Don’t label anything clearly.
Common navigation tools are too easy to understand! Why have an “about” page to explain who you are and why you have a website? If you use a synonym for the word “about”, but provide the exact same information you would normally, you can confuse your visitors without having to do much work.

Consider words such as:

• Author
• Legacy
• Identity
• Pretentious Asshole with a Thesaurus
• Me

4. Abuse long filenames.
No one reads URLs these days, anyway. That’s why companies don’t put their website’s full domain on all their business cards, and popular domain names don’t get sold for huge sums of money. Why not show your disregard for basic readability by having the most unwieldy URLs imaginable?

To start off, you’ll need two or three hyphens in the domain. But make sure not to put a hyphen between every word, because that would create a pattern. Use something like bensawesome-web-site.org.uk — and make sure to never use a common TLD such as .com or .net! Those are for conformists, anyway.

When people go to your website, make an index.html redirect them to Main_Page.htm — search engines will thank you later! If you need to redesign your website, just put all your work in /New%20Web%20Site/. When your new design reaches the deployment stage, just change your index redirect to go to /New%20Web%20Site/Main_Page.htm. Who needs to do things like removing superfluous directories, or not using characters that require awkward workarounds? That’s just unnecessary effort. Note: The mix of spaces and underscores is crucial! Think different!

3. Tilt everything.

2. Make everything a PDF.
If your website has rich content that would benefit from a rich format such as PDF, make sure to put it in a PDF. If your website has ordinary content that could easily be placed on the website itself, make sure to put that in a PDF, too. And whatever you do, never make any indication that your links lead to PDFs. Everyone likes surprises!

If you put your text in a PDF without any ornamentation, though, people might notice how much of a dumbass you are. Take the extra time to underline random words and add inappropriate colours. Arrange everything in a table so it looks like a half-assed Excel spreadsheet, and your audience will be successfully fooled! Take another shot.

1. Don’t have a favicon.
A favicon is that little icon to the left of the URL bar in all modern web browsers. It used to be rather uncommon, but it’s totally ubiquitous on the web nowadays. But not for your website! After taking all that effort tilting all the images, putting all your text into PDFs, writing long filenames, and reading the thesaurus, who has time to make a favicon? It’s not like it only takes 15 seconds or anything! But this might not be the right approach for you…

There are certain Firefox extensions that can replace the hideous “no favicon” image with appealing shapes and such things. The only way to foil these extensions’ attack on your artistic integrity is to master the art of giving your website a bad favicon. A good start would be to take a picture of something irrelevant, then resize it with MS Paint. If you don’t have a camera, just take something off Google Image Search.

If you’re really feeling creative, why not skip the photo part entirely and just give your website a white box for a favicon? In fact, why not replace your entire website with a big white box? No one is going to read the damn thing anyway. And it might help you get into art school, what with all those high standards and all.

There really is an art to making a website so appalling that no one will ever read it. It’s an art that some people just don’t have the talent for, but they shouldn’t feel too bad. At least they’re trying. Some people just use Microsoft Frontpage.

A good movie creates a contract with the audience: the conclusion will be satisfying. Think of the plotline as a map to this conclusion: a series of events along a path from Point A to Point B. The conclusion is foreshadowed by the events that precede it. The audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but when they look back at the movie, they need to see how one event followed from another. Thus, the plot of a good movie has inevitability: the conclusion seems inevitable.

Complex stories have one plotline in the foreground, and several more plotlines in the background to provide context. Without context, everything is meaningless: this is why the best stories usually have subplots. But what story could be more complex than life itself? It stands to reason that life would have an infinite number of background plotlines, stretching backwards so far that we can’t even perceive them.

Think about the monitor you’re looking at right now. Doesn’t it have a plotline? That monitor has a story to tell, from the person who invented it, to the components it comprises, to its arrival in front of you. Everything in life has a plotline, but we’re generally only concerned with a few foreground plotlines. Life functions are not foreground plotlines in the West, since we’re not concerned with them unless they get in the way. The foreground plotlines of individual people are their emotional arcs: love and ambition.

If life is like a good movie, its foreground plot needs to have inevitability. There is a definite starting point to both of my plotlines; as soon as I was old enough to feel ambitious or in love, Point A was set. Of course I had no idea where Point B would be — I still don’t. Some people never do. But just like a good movie, I have a contract with life. I know when I’m satisfied, and I know, deep down, when I’ve reached the right conclusion.

My parents were together for twelve years before they broke up. Twelve years before my mother realized that she wasn’t in love. At some point, she looked back along the route of events that led her to where she was, and realized that she wasn’t heading to Point B anymore. Maybe it took her a long time, but she eventually saw it. It was inevitable, given a long enough time frame. Like the original ending of Fight Club, the events didn’t match the conclusion. Point B would be a surprise, yes, but it would never be a non sequitur. The movie adaptation changed the ending, and even the original author agrees that the new ending is more satisfying.

Love is the people you care about, and ambition is the things you want to accomplish. It took me a long time to make some real guesses about the conclusions of these arcs. Where is my Point B? I think I know, but I might have an epiphany someday, like my mother did. There’s nothing to do but continue along a path until I find the conclusion that seems inevitable.

I try not to worry about my life’s direction too much; at least, not in the abstracted sense. I’m still trying to find the right plotline, and it’s better to die trying than to never try at all. I have a contract with life, and I won’t give up until I fulfill it.