With all the hullabaloo over medical reform in the U.S., you might wonder what health care looks like in other parts of the world. At this hospital in Japan, your care comes with a healthy side order of flashing, blinking Lucky Cats, and a prescription strength dose of animated gifs.

Warning: If you're epileptic, we take no responsibility for what may happen if you click to view this Fugly Friday. And, for once, we're really not joking.

Granted, I don't read Kanji, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that this site is in need of some time in the emergency room. Even if the visible text were eloquent and poignant -- and I could read Japanese -- the overwhelming and incredibly inappropriate use of crazy color combos, frames and the dreaded solid black background of doom makes this a Fugly Friday to remember -- and avoid.

Before there was anything today's Internet users would think of as "web design," there was GeoCities. The homepage service that let absolutely anyone try his or her hand at putting something on the Internet is also one of the cradles of contemporary Web Fugly. In fact, Fugly Friday owes such a debt to the GeoCities aesthetic that this week's installment is going to take a trip down memory lane to look at some early innovations in tearing a human being's eye out using pure HTML.

Today's fugly site, HTML Advanced Tricks & Tips, is a cookbook for everything that make GeoCities sites painful to look at. Tables! Frames! Scrolling marquee text! I will grant you that some people continue to defend tables to this day, but I don't think anyone is defending those animated flame GIFs. Good luck navigating this page by clicking on the text: it's not linked. You're not going anywhere unless you click on those dancing flames. Maybe that's a secret you learn from the "HTML Writer's Guild" once they give you a cool badge like the one on this homepage.

As for the tips themselves? Closing your tags is still decent advice, and cropping and shrinking your graphics was a necessity back in the low-bandwidth heyday of GeoCities. These tips were actually not terrible at the time, but the author has to mess it up by slapping on animated GIFs and encouraging the use of the marquee tag. Between those two, we've covered most of what made every GeoCities page so terrible. Add an autoplaying midi and you'd have a Fugly Tutorial Trifecta.

(This post was made possible by Reocities, a GeoCities rescue attempt that backed up 600,000 pages of potential fugly before Yahoo! shut off GeoCities' animated flashing lights for good.)

Do you tire of your humdrum, meatspace world? Does Sony's PlayStation Home look too real? Are there too many flying penises in Second Life for your taste? Well, strap on your hippie goggles and head over to Cybertown, where VRML never really went out of style, it just got better textures.

I remember stumbling into Cybertown around the turn of this century and being plenty impressed. Back then, before Shockwave got all 3D and around the time of RealPlayer G2's enhanced multimedia capabilities, this was neat stuff. Now, sadly, CyberTown is pretty much a Cyber-GhostTown.

No one but the resident chat bot appeared while I was online, and the markets, parks and cities were devoid of anything but a futuristic, bleak landscape. Pretty much what Caprica looked like after the Cylons were done bombing it to oblivion. Except with references to RealPlayer G2 (I kid you not).

Now, of course, even without any human meatbags occupying the place, it is rather sad. The graphics haven't improved in years, despite the new owners' insistence upon pending upgrades. The Blaxxun plug-in (not Mac or Linux compatible) is an older version as well, which doesn't say much for those upgrades. Adding insult to injury, the site owners now charge $5 a month for the privilege of walking through this virtual ghost town. Does it get sadder? Yeah, it kind of does. Check the gallery.

Every week, I abuse myself for your amusement by seeking out yet another horribly constructed web site and poking fun at its awfulness. Doctors and Optometrists write in each week to warn of the damage I'm doing to myself. My shrink is buying a new beach house on the expected revenue to be generated by my nervous breakdown. But still -- glutton for punishment that I am -- I continue to seek the holy grail of websuck.

This week's bin of bargains brought me to MSY Technology (Pty. LTD.. whatever that means). MSY will probably never top a greatest hits list of horrible websites -- with a total lack of dancing house pets, no click the Mel Gibson games, and colors that won't cause psychotic episodes. Those are the nicest possible things you can write about them, in every other respect MSY is awash in sin.

Take this price list for example. If you can make it through 2 colorful stanzas without clawing at your own eyeballs, you're a braver man than I.

by the time you scroll through the second page, you're asking God to bring on the E-bomb to mercifully send us back to paper, quills and candlelight.

Somehow, the marketing genius who crafted this abomination in Microsoft Word felt you'd have the stamina to endure twelve whole pages. That's twelve pages of nearly random font size changes, the word "HOT" next to every line item, and an entire page of warnings, disclaimers, addendum and notes in prologue. By the time you scroll through page one, you've forgotten what you were looking for -- and, by the time you scroll through the second page, you're asking God to bring on the E-bomb to mercifully send us back to paper, quills and candlelight.

What's worse? Customers on one Australian review site not only call MSY untrustworthy, unhelpful, filthy and even downright rude but -- one reviewer warns -- if you call them asking for prices, they'll refer you to their website!

Have faith, Fugly Friday Fan. If there is a just and righteous God in our midst, then certainly there is a giant gift basket of FAIL waiting for MSY's web author on his arrival in hell.

[Via Digg, circa 2006]

Oh Idaho. We love your delicious baking potatoes, the mouth feel we get when we say "Boise", and, uh, whatever the third thing to love about Idaho might be. In any event, that third thing to love about Idaho probably isn't quality web design.

Poor layout, dancing graphics, overuse of capital letters; I've learned to forgive quite a bit. What bothers me most about Bannock County Bluegrass Festival is their complete and utter disrespect for the trichromacy of the human eye. Purple, Cyan and Green should never have existed in the same universe, much less a single web page.

In fact, the only single point upon which those three colors should converge is in a low-rent stripper's eye makeup. As Marge Simpson's mother once said, "Ladies pinch. Whores use rouge."

Nevertheless, if you happen to be near Pocatello, Idaho this weekend -- and I'm sure you must have your reasons. S'ok, we won't question your judgment -- check out some Bluegrass and beer. But, if you run into this guy, for the sake of everything holy and decent, please offer to buy him a color wheel.

[Thanks Peter!]

My optometrist was insistent that I not remove the bandages for another 24 hours. He also said I might have done less damage to myself if, instead of searching for today's Fugly Friday, I'd tried something safer like scouring my own eyes with a gentle bath of rock salt. He also said something about a fork. As I laughed, encased in my world of darkness and unable to see his face, a chill came over the room and I suddenly realized he wasn't joking.

So, before clicking on the misery that is Yvette's Bridal, just remember, you've been warned. According to the source, Yvette's was crafted (or rather, bludgeoned) into existence using Yahoo SiteBuilder. Once my eyes heal completely, I'll be mounting a campaign to have SiteBuilder banned as a dangerous munition.

From what I'm told, in more socially conscious jurisdictions, possession of SiteBuilder is already highly criminalized, or at least relegated to downtrodden neighborhoods where it can be segregated from productive society. Sure, they provide prophylactic templates -- and many of them don't take visual assault to an aggravated degree -- but, given SiteBuilder is capable of constructing maliciously eye-gouging wonders like Yvette's, it should at the very least require a background check, and a three day waiting period before you're allowed to download.

Web 2.0 style is its own special brand of Fugly. Hundreds of sites capitalize on the volcanically-hot design trends that signal a Web 2.0 property, but botch the job and end up looking like they were made with cookie cutters in 2007. But now, botching the job can be even easier, with Tiny Designer! You can create your own hideous Web 2.0 elements in seconds, including plenty of gradients, that ubiquitous lime-green color, and (of course) the always-popular "beta" badge.

Can you believe that the entire Tiny Designer site was made using elements from Tiny Designer? I sure can: it's atrocious. From the glossy sticky notes (why?) to the misappropriated Twitterrific bird at the bottom of the site, everything about Tiny Designer does violence to the entire idea of design. If you're not too stunned by the eyeful of horrors that is the Tiny Designer front page, launch the design gallery and see what other abominations this Frankensite hath wrought.

And all of this is to say nothing of the clunky, stilted user experience of actually attempting to make anything in Tiny Designer. The tool's disorderly UI involves a lot of toolbars stacked on top of one another, and, of course, a lot of gloss. If you thought the dismal results people produced with Tiny Designer were somehow due to user incompetence, you'll change your tune once you try to do anything with it. I'm predicting a long weekend of nightmares about the entire web being rebuilt with Tiny Designer.

Nowadays, what with the internet and all, you can pretty much pick up "good" (read: adequate) design for free and all over the place. There are templates for EZ, no-bake websites to beat the band. But Twitter's oddball format doesn't lend itself to much more than a blurb in terms of customization. That doesn't mean people won't maximize that space.

There are also folks butchering the design, but maybe it's not their fault. Twitter isn't really designed to be designed -- the profiles are mere vanity. You're looking at them when you tweet, and relying on people to visit them and give you a 3 second verdict to follow or unfollow (coming to NBC this Fall).

Here's a few interesting specimens we found:

• HotTweeps - Nothing says quality like improper use of Photoshop's magic wand.
• shawnshewchuk - Whoa dude, your logo is like, totally huge.
• DavidLetterman - Even if Dave approved of Twitter, he'd disapprove of the animated GIF in the profile pic. Careful he doesn't sue the Worldwide Pants off of you.
• Now here's YGrab, who AAAAH, my eyes! Who says you can't mix orange and blue? Over and over. No repeating backgrounds, ever!
  
• Here's one of zillions of those "gonna put all my info in the rail" designs. Be selective, people.
• Maybe this isn't a design thing, maybe it's just a thing where we haven't been typing in all caps on the internet for about a decade, but this guy needs to cut it out.
• If it's self-indulgence you wish to see, but you're burnt on celeb tweets, may we suggest Twouchebags? Aside from being a great name for a band or bar, it's a good resource for, well, people whose behaviors might make cause them to be labeled something rhyming with Twouchebags.

Finally there's the leeches and remoras of the Twitter landscape, all those "get a zillion followers and die rich!" sites. Funny this is, most of them don't show their Twitter account names ON their site. Inspired Magazine has a pretty funny roundup of these jokers.

Sometimes you're presented with something so illustrative of a concept that it stands completely on its own. For example, if I wanted to present the concept of bad music to someone, I could simply mail them a copy of Miley Cyrus' latest album. Without presenting any supporting evidence or explanation, the message would be universally received. The Most Amazing Website On The Internet is much the same for the concept of smart-ass high-school students forced to take an HTML class..

The site -- apparently designed in answer to a school project which offered no concern as to visual appeal, or safety for epileptics -- nails the concept. An auto-starting MIDI file, dancing cats, an oddly disembodied and highly mobile Mel Gibson, and a (late season) full cast photo from Full House are all used to spectacular effect.

Regular readers of Fugly Friday might accuse me of taking the easy way out this week. Hitting a low hanging piece of fruit with a cheap shot before turning to run. I beg to differ with those naysayers and hand-wringers. This is indeed low hanging fruit, but it also may be the absolute ugliest site on the web, and that in and of itself is an amazingly difficult task.

Click through. I dare you. But first, let me warn; There are some things in life that, once seen, cannot be unseen.

[Thanks to Oldmanhorton for the tip]

You know, the reason we do these is in part to educate, in part to entertain, and in no small part because we just find the weirdest stuff on the web and must share it. Like the old Ellen Degeneres joke, "here, this tastes awful, try some!" With that in mind, take a moment to view Welkom op de site van Willy's & Marjetten. Yes, fugly comes in many flavors and languages. In this case, it's Flemish. Read the hilarious Google translation here.*

When you are done wiping the blood from your eyeballs, let's discuss this atrocity, shall we? First off, clearly the gods of GIF smiled upon this site, as we see so often in the fugly department. Look at all those animations, bouncing around and not really doing anything but causing cognitive dissonance. So that's where my migraine came from!

Willy's page isn't all bad, however. Instead of using bgsound or autoplaying a media file, there's an auto-play Flash button which plays some truly atrocious music. But at least you can turn it off. That's a plus.

I should also mention Willy's not entirely living in the stone ages where design is concerned. While I found this page on a hunt for FrontPage atrocities (FrontPage being wanted for browser war crimes, and increasingly tough to track down), the site appears to have eschewed the old FP template for... CSS! Yep, I found a stylesheet attached to the page. Unfortunately the only thing it is used for: setting the font to Marker Felt. Cue the sad trombone. Yeah, the page is otherwise a mess of <td>'s, which makes babies cry.

*Epilogue: I hear this page was supposed to be set up as an example of bad 90's web design. And, in fact, it was built for a Flemish TV series called Willy's en Marjetten. So it would seem the fugly was all in the name of parody. Note that, at the end of the series, all the characters died. Bad design kills, kids, so stay off FrontPage and stay in design school. That said, how many real and serious sites still look like this? Send us your answers in the comments.

I didn't think it was possible to fall out of the ugly tree and actually hit every branch on the way down. I thought that was just a figure of speech. One of those idiomatic expressions we use to describe something without really describing it. The Solutions Network proved I have a thing or two to learn about metaphors.

Imagine a site so jumbled with affiliate links, so riddled with primary colors, so overbearing in its use of tables -- filling every last inch of visible space with something you could click on, NOW! -- that any pretense of goodwill towards your fellow man you've ever held evaporates like so much dew from the top layer of a landfill in the morning sun.

It's a trainwreck of html, a prank played entirely in font tags. It simply must be.

The only thing the designer failed to use is BLINK. I'm going to guess that failure was either an intentional oversight -- one tiny concession to good taste in a sea of disgust -- or that he was so overwhelmed by the site himself that he fell dead at the keyboard before adding that one last cardinal sin of bad web design.

But wait, there's more. Immediately after your browser loads the last site you'll ever want to visit, a voice comes booming from your speakers, proclaiming that you've reached "the busiest site on the internet!" The irony is nearly enough to kill a man.

The cherry on top? Even the favicon is animated. I'm not even sure how you'd go about animating a favicon. You know why I'm not sure? Because, even without seeing an example of an animated favicon, my brain attempts to suck my own eyeballs deep within the recesses of my skull upon the very mention -- a physiological response I can only imagine was developed through generations of evolutionary genius as a last-ditch defense mechanism to prevent serious brain damage from spreading among the population.

If The Solutions Network is your personal key to making money on the internets, I highly reccomend that you begin scouting for a sturdy cardboard box in which to live at your earliest opportunity.

[Thanks Andrew for the tip. My shrink will be sending you the bill for my next 3 visits]

The thing about technology is that it isn't inherently good or bad, it's how we choose to use it that makes it so. This has been true since the first humans picked up a bone and fashioned a hammer. Some used it to build, and others to kill. So it is with the web -- except the killing part, maybe. We've seen some great stuff like Google's search engine, Delicious bookmarks and Pandora's music engine. But then there's the low barrier to making web pages, spawning the sort of nightmares you'll find at Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease.

Now look, I'm not trashing Alek's work with Christmas lights (personally I love web-controlled lights and the hobbyists who do these light shows are really dedicated) and I'm certainly not saying Celiac disease is a cause unworthy of attention. I only wish Alek hadn't chosen the following things for his site:

• Autoplay MIDI music
• Cutesy javascript cursor follow
• Dense text everywhere
• Wacky fonts from 1996

These are the web equivalents of polyester suits. Cute when worn as a joke, not so cute when used at a serious job interview. Same here: a redesign might bring more awareness to Celiac disease, a tough condition which requires a gluten-free diet.

Ultimately the question becomes one of content vs. presentation. Does poor presentation trump content, or does great content rise above bad presentation? I found a nice summary of this notion from 2006 at LukeW's site:

Many sites with a poor visual presentation remain popular on the merits of their content alone. But does their audience enjoy bumping through the site's awkward graphics and hard to read labels? No, but the personality of the content (it could be high quality, funny, worthwhile, and more) makes the rest bearable. Would their audience be happier if the personality of the presentation matched the personality of the content? Of course.

Perhaps a designer could donate some time to making Alek's site visibly more manageable? Alek's site is already pretty famous, so I can't help but think that a facelift would help his cause.

Unfortunately the stout folks at Guinness don't have a "World's Worst Website" category (best I could find was the worst mouse plague, which I assume happens frequently in schools). Fear not, as one intrepid designer has endeavored to show by way of example; I give you the "World's Worst Website," and oh boy, does it deliver.

Pretty much every web design sin in the book is covered, from hosting with Angelfire, to using frames, marquee text, blinking backgrounds, misspellings, links to dead-end pages and much, much more. Try turning your sound all the way up before visiting, then run.

This appears to be created by Michelle from Gold Nugget Webs, a site that isn't exactly fugly, but isn't going to win any awards, either. In fact, it appears Michelle has a thing for understated design, opting to choose aliased text, pixelated JPEG's and CAPS LOCK. To be fair, I get the feeling her clients aren't the most web-savvy or design-savvy bunch (do you know of an opal mine that Starck designed?), so what you see could be at the client's request. And I've certainly had the experience of a client demanding something that made you want to retch. Still, as a monument to fugliness, Michelle's "Worst Website" is easily in the top 10.

Last week I covered RogerART, but this week I'm going to look at a great source of ugly sites. Three sources, in fact. The first is known by millions of people: Fark. Yes, I picked Fark because it has, traditionally, carried a lot of links to local news sites or personal sites. And let's be honest: most local affiliate sites (like your local ABC/NBC/CBS TV station's site) look like crap. They have been getting better in the past couple of years (competition breeds UI upgrades, apparently), but I still think the trend to bland, generic pages isn't anything to crow about. Thank you, Fark, for the years of fugliness. I won't mention the horrid Photoshop atrocities you'll find there, mostly because there's a certain folk art aspect to those hilarious GIFs...

Speaking of fugly imagery, the other two sites are jumping off points for even more fugly spelunking: Worst of the Web and Jim Westergren's list of "Worst Web Design Ever." Worst of the Web has archives going all the way back to 1996, but many of the sites they reviewed are either gone or upgraded -- you'll have to cross check with the Internet Archives to see the real fugs there. But Jim's list is pure comedy gold (RogerArt is on there, for example). The sites he features are a mishmash of personal sites and just plain crazy design disasters. Like the MIA site, which I'm not sure, but I think that atrocity is actually on purpose.

Do you know of any other lists of fugly sites? I remember one about 7 years ago that pointed to this guy, but I can't find it now.