Web redesigns make us want to spit

THE DAWN OF 2006 brings us a bunch of freshly redesigned IT web sites, and most of them are blatantly awful and ugly. Many have had their worst offending features rolled back, but in their place more festering wounds grow.

People in 2005 voted against pop-ups, and it did the trick. Now they have flash and CSS slide-in ads. Well, those worthless annoyances finally made me pick up flashblock and install it, oh nirvana. Sites that insert pages between a link and it's destination though get off my 'to read' list fast, are you listening CNet?

The worst thing is that most of these damnable redesigns have shortened page lengths to what seems like just under a paragraph. They probably would be shorter if these louses could figure out how to split a benchmark bar graph up across three pages and still have it make sense. 39 pages? Sure, as long as you are writing something worth that.

The whole practice of two lines a page has to stop now. I know, you need your greedy ad dollars, but rather than put out good content, you make out lives hard. There are two major sites that just got taken off my reading list, not because of content, that has been pretty poor for a long time on both. In this case, it is 80 ads on a page with less content than a decent headline.

With any luck, there will be a reader revolt, and page hits will actually drop. Nah, I doubt it, most web users make even stupid sheep look intelligent, they'll just sit back an take this like masochistic monkeys huddled in dark corners. Sadly, the rest of us have to read this crap on occasion. µ