I love looking at ugly websites
There is such an unending emptiness with modern website design.
Not even mentioning how the biggest websites have auto-cannibalized to become shadows of their previously acclaimed "personality". It's hard to find a website on this list that does not check the same boxes of being panel-based, boring slates of slides, hamburger menus and sign-up pages.
Even smaller websites for local businesses, projects and even people, fall into the horrible marketing trap of using something blemishless like Squarespace or Wordpress. These services promise a website that will be unique to you. The results are almost always panel-based mockeries of the big sites. They all become the same and blur into each other, losing the work and individuality of the person behind it.
The truth of a lot of these block-based website builders is that they are formatted in ways to get people to buy something. The sleek veneer templates give a sense of professionalism and legitimacy to get people to buy shit from them. Digital minimalism has become an established aesthetic for online stores.
On the more personal side of the internet, social media profiles are really sad representations of a past time when your page was really your page. Old Youtube channels are a really good representation of the range of freedom in personalization for social media pages, especially for large platforms. Over time, channel pages changed and took more and more and more away, until finally, every Youtube channel page is the same.
Even a website like Substack, a place that I felt had promise as a place for personality, only allows you to make some small color palette changes to your page and are all based on the same handful of templates. Everything is painfully standard.
Why am I really upset about all these sites being carbon copies of one another? Largely because it makes the internet, a place that everyone visits at this point, a much less expressive space. Companies like Google and Facebook have perfected content-delivery systems for video and photos that make any other distractions on the page prevent people from consuming directly what is uploaded. What isn't usually considered is that websites are a medium in and of itself.
It's not really a new concept, people have been using HTML and CSS to make visually striking pages that are the draw themselves. The gaudy, ugly, messy and colorful websites of days gone by are yearned for again for their flavor, simplicity and interest. Funky shapes and unbearable dumps of text are in vogue, specifically because it is counter-cultural to the current state of website design.
I love looking at websites like this specifically because they are so gruesome. Simple HTML tags and a billion links to click through gives the website life to me. It develops a network of places that you can visit and becomes a little digital labyrinth to look around. It's helpful that the reemergence of personal websites fall into this camp. There are so many sites out there that feel exciting to explore, specifically because they have a unique visual identity.
I use the word ugly relatively. They are ugly in the sense that they are a bit lopsided in the current state of internet website design. The vast majority of sites attempt to look professional and give some sense of prestige to them. Basic HTML sites, don't really do this, and it's not a bad thing. These sites are beautiful in their own way. They are signals of the antiquated past of the internet. They hold a certain joviality in them that cannot be captured in sans-serif, grey, panelled websites. In a fun way, it makes the internet significantly less serious, something that I think should be strived for.
Not to mention that the ability to have greater freedom with website design can produce some (no joke) serious pieces of art that cannot be reproduced in any other medium. Adventure through this list of some websites I've found lately, and I'm sure you'll see what I mean.
-bzg