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.

5. Splash screens
Why do these exist? I can’t think of a single website that actually benefits from having a splash screen. In case you don’t know, a splash screen is just a page saying “welcome to this site!” with an enter link that usually takes you to what should be the index. On some particularly obnoxious sites, the splash screen will be some huge Flash monstrosity that takes longer to load than the rest of the site. There is simply no reason to have a splash screen.

4. Unnecessary Flash and Javascript
This is a common mistake made by big websites. In their mission to make their website as elegant as possible, they break the cardinal rule of web design: make the site work quickly. Nothing really lags for me, but you’re probably not designing for people like me. You’re probably designing for the average person that doesn’t have an incredible computer with a lightning-fast internet connection. Filling your website with Flash and Javascript just to pretty it up will do nothing but slow the site down and cause many frustrated visitors.

3. Sound
There should never be sound on your website unless the visitor makes an overt decision to hear sound, or it’s in a place where it’s obviously expected (such as a game). My favourite combination here is when bad webdesigners combine #5 and #3 together — a splash screen with music! So now you can have the inconvenience of a) going through an extra page for no reason, b) having everyone within earshot hear that you’ve gone through an extra page for no reason, and c) downloading a song that you didn’t want to listen to in the first place. If this is your idea of a great website, please set fire to your computer.

2. In-line advertisements
I know you need money, but is it really necessary to have every other word on your website link to some advertisement? Luckily, it seems that only really atrocious websites do this, but it always baffled me. There’s no quicker way to ruin the enjoyment in your site then by making every link suspicious. You never know whether a link is going to be an ad or a real page — the easiest way to find out, by hovering your cursor over the link to check the target URL, will just make the ad appear if there is one. Your visitors end up never clicking anything because they’ll just assume that everything is an ad. Your content becomes a jumbled mess that no one will ever want to read.

1. Sprawling web communities
Oh, dear. Just to be clear, I’ll explain: by “sprawling web community”, I mean those websites that have a forum. And on that forum, you might find that 10% of the users actually know what website they’re on. Yeah, that kind of forum. These are ridiculously common, which is understandable. People run out of material to talk about, so they just start talking about other things, which leads to everyone getting to know each other, which leads to everyone hating newbies, which leads to some weird internet subculture. It’s cool if you’re a member of the forum, but it’s extremely annoying to be the one in charge of the forum. All you want is a forum for fans of your site, but it seems like half the people on your forum aren’t fans anymore, if they ever were to begin with.

This one is a bit harder to prevent, and isn’t really an aspect of web design at all. It’s more dependent on your website’s target audience. If your audience includes the kinds of people who would be likely to hang around forums all day… well, you’re pretty much screwed. You’re going to have to fight for your community to stop it from breaking away. Trust me: I can think of several websites off the top of my head that no longer have anything to do with what they were originally about. This was all caused by the forum growing and devouring all the real content, then becoming a giant orgy of self-reference (like every forum). I don’t want to name any sites specifically, in the interest of sparing people’s feelings.

Personally, I think forum sprawl is a serious threat to a lot of websites. And it’s one people will often ignore until it’s too late. It’s not strictly part of web design, but it’s still something very important to the website, and the kind of thing that the webmaster should keep in mind when they make their plans.

Anyway, now I’m done whining about stuff. It’s good to put something negative here every once in a while, since I’m usually pretty positive. Maybe next time I’ll make a post about my favourite web design patterns.