Worst Website of the Week Redux

A few months ago, I started a category on here of “Worst Website of the Week”. I come across so many horribly-designed websites that I thought I should start pointing out the worst examples, listing exactly what was wrong with them; in this I was following the example of Web pages That Suck, which does just that. Naive idiot that I am, I was trying to do my bit towards raising web standards.
I only got to three entries. The reaction, from two website owners, was overwhelmingy awful and negative. One of them dug up the old Yahoo Geocities Oakleaf Circle site that I had forgotten about, put it through an online validator and gloating emailed the results, with a “call yourself a webdesigner?” sneer; the fact that the page in question clearly stated “…next year, in 2003, we hope to…” apparently didn’t give him a clue that the site was a very early effort of mine and not current. (Fully half of the dozen validation errors listed were, in cany case, due to Geocities’ own ad coding.) Additionally, he didn’t even have the courage to sign his own name, but wrote anonymously as “A Wellwisher” from a Hotmail addy; it was perfectly obvious who he was, so Paul, if you’re reading this – I have a Scorpio Moon.
The other one (who at least did sign his name) posted about me and my criticism of his site on a message board and dozens of his charming, literate young friends emailed me with their own thoughts on the matter. I still have their comments somewhere – full of obscenities, misspelling, garbage txt-speak and oh-so-clever criticisms of my own website designs. Thank you Neil, for introducing me to such lovely people. (Although, if I had friends like those, I wouldn’t want to admit to it.)
What was depressing about all this was that neither of the people who were so offended by my comments conceded that there was anything at all wrong with their sites, and were totally dismissive of the needs of disabled users. (One of Neil’s pals even said “But blind people don’t read websites, stupid!” He probably thinks that blind people don’t read newspapers or watch TV either.) And they felt the need to pick at small faults in my own designs, like minor misspellings, for instance, and “boring colours” (?!) and “too much text” (this was one of A Wellwisher’s comment on the current Oakleaf Circle site; hey, it’s an information and listings site, buddy – unlike your own site, it doesn’t need fancy Flash animations and gargantuan graphics to get people to look at it.) And they got personal as well – the discovery that I am a practising pagan bought comments like “Stick to dancing around stones, you [blank] old cow.” “Old cow”, usually with one of two or three qualifying expletives, was their main term of abuse for me; considering that they were on a designers’ board, they showed a marked lack of imagination. One of them, posting on the forum, wittily suggested that I should be signed up to some porn sites; the little twit obviously thought that I was some strait-laced old spinster type who’d faint away at the sight of hot pr0n action. I found his assumption almost amusing. Almost.
Anyway, just a week of this hostile, negative, sexist, agist, mysogynistic, bullying abuse was enough. So I deleted the offending posts. (“Can dish it out but can’t take it!” crowed Neil. Wrong, wrong, wrong, young man; I have never “dished out” anything like the kind of expletive-filled, ignorant, hateful abuse that I got from your little pals.)

So, anyway, what bought it all back? Well, I’ve just come across this post from I Never Knew about the personal abuse that some bloggers have experienced:

I think a lot of the bad behavior we have been seeing is due to people not knowing the current ‘web medium’ that well. Some people don’t realize what blogs are or that they are even on one. They often treat blog writers the way they do someone in the next car, speeding along and not hearing them, not realizing the comments are going straight to email, right next to mom’s hello and hitting the bloggers right in the jaw, not bouncing off the windows of a car you’ll never see again……some people are just vicious uncivilized dumb arses.

Quite.

PS: I mentioned that I posted about three badly-designed websites, and got negative reactions from two of them. Well, I got a reaction from the third also – a nice email thanking me for pointing out the faults in the design and asking for advice on correcting them. Two of the website owners were men, one was a woman. Guess which one sent the postive reaction…..