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The People's Choice Award for Overall Bad Web Design Award

Hayden Video Weddings

This site beat some very strong competition — heck, it beat a lot of the other sites that won in their category.

My original comments: This page really confuses me. It's not the home page and, of course, I can't find any links from the home page to this page. It just doesn't look real, but it probably is real.

Why...

• ...is there a background picture that repeats itself?
• ...are there birds and spiders (?) falling down from the top?
• ... are there these white lines across the page (and the woman's face) with blue text?
• ...does the page go on forever?
• ...does the text change color?
• ...is there no organization?
• ...does this site exist?

Reader comments: Needs to scale it waaaaaaaaaay back. Too much going on here. Suggestions:

• Get rid of the falling animation. It's distracting and makes the page hard to read.
• Change the background to something more subtle, or a solid tasteful color. You can barely read the text on that photo, and it looks odd tiled down the page.
• Change the font to something other than all in italics. Yes, italics/script have a wedding tone, but it's hard to read that much text in that type of font.
• Right click disable: It doesn't work. Ever.

Basically the page needs an overhaul. With all due respect to the author, the current colors, layout, etc., are a serious blow to the company's credibility. There needs to be a sleeker, more professional, modern look here.

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Wow...there's no way...

I was a little confused when everyone was talking about the birds...and then I clicked the URL bar and BAM! They showed up...Those poor birds, they're just going to keep falling....and falling....and falling.

This site gives some past suckers a good name. I'm in shock. The main site is "eh"...It's a little too distracting though the concept is leaning slightly towards the cool side.

In IE 6, all you have to do to get around the no right click, is go to view and then click source.

Oh yes, and this was created in FrontPage 4.0...I hate FrontPage with a passion, all it does is screw up my home computer.

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Which leaves us with Hayden Video Weddings. How doest thou suck? Let me count the ways ... no, on second thought, the numbers involved are too large for mortal comprehension. What I can't get over, every time I look at that page, is that someone actually put that page together, looked at it, and said "this is good!"

For one thing, it's not a web site, it's a web page — it's all one honking huge hideous train wreck of a page. It too gets points for keyword stuffing — look for the tiny print. It's got scrolling text. It's got those crashing things — only by turning JavaScript off could I see they were flowers. You also need to turn JavaScript off if you want a better look at one of their images, since they think there's any person alive who would actually want to copy one.

Then there's the text, that part of it that is not keyword stuffing, that is. Most notably the blue boldface text. They do such strange things with punctuation that I think the Earth's rotation has been subtly shifted by my long-ago high school English teacher spinning in her grave at 7200 RPM. They're trying to explain their services, and they do so rather verbosely, but then they abbreviate "hours" to "hrs" several times.

They have gobs of links for no practical reasons, though I did find the one for a DNA paternity testing service rather amusing, given the topic of the site. And I've saved the best for last: the background. Just why they've chosen to very effectively camouflage most of their site with that high-contrast background image of a rather panicked-looking woman having a bad hair day is totally beyond my comprehension, as is what they think it adds to the site that justifies the 128k it takes up.

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