The Bad

McKamey Manor

While not the worst website in the world, McKamey Manor's website leaves a lot to be desired. McKamey Manor is a former haunted house turned psychological torture survival challenge. It started out innocently enough, but fell down a slippery slope as they tried to make the house more and more terrifying each year. Eventually the house was shut down and moved to Tennessee in what was most likely an attempt to flee from tax collectors, and it only exists as a shell of its former self. The website for McKamey Manor now exists as merchandising site for the declining business.

The home page is rather lackluster, with animated text filling the screen in a relatively choppy manner. About a third of the page is just blank white space at the bottom as well. The rest of the pages are messily formatted, possibly in an attempt to avoid repetition, but in this case it hurts more than helps, as the navigation bar is only present on about half the pages and on the others takes the form of a vertical list. Instead of the merchandise button linking directly to the store page, instead it sends you to a page that tells you to follow another link. In some of the pages the background images clash with the color of the text, making things very difficult to read. Overall it is just a mess of a website that reeks of the owner paying the lowest bidder, probably some neighborhood computer nerd, to make it.

I would not recommend anyone visit this website. You'd be better off searching for the linked YouTube videos individually and avoiding the eye strain of looking at this website, even if it does have them linked in the same place. If for some reason you found yourself in need of merchandise it's faster to just search for it on google and select the second result than it is to navigate through an extra page. Surprisingly enough I actually found the mobile site a bit easier on the eyes, although it is still bad. When comparing Microsoft Edge to Firefox, I believe, based on the home page animation, that Firefox loads it just a bit faster, but there are no major differences. As I finish up this blog post I actually remembered a website that I have used in the past that might just be worse than this, but I'll leave that for another blog post.

The Good

Active Theory

The site that I chose to represent as "the good," the pinnacle of web design, that all other websites should strive to achieve, was activetheory.net. I just found this website today. I searched google for "beautiful website reddit," followed one of the links to awwwards.com, and from there sorted by site of the year and picked what I personally found to be the most visually appealing. Active Theory is a small company builds custom designed websites and applications for other companies, so it makes sense that their own website would be a stunner. They have built two websites for Adult Swim, a programming block on a major television network, as well as many others.

I'm honestly not sure how to describe what makes this website so good. It is well beyond my current understanding how they were able to make it as nice as it is. Each page within the site is accompanied with a nice, animated visual that aren't so flashy as to distract from the actual content. The different files within the website are navigable using the scroll wheel as well as via menu and transition fluidly for the most part. The text is concise and easy to read, and there are links to more information if desired. And overall the website is just a pleasure to look at.

As for whether or not I would recommend this website, for anyone looking to hire a company to design their web page, or an application I say most definitely. For the average user I don't really see any need to visit this site, as it doesn't actually provide any value to them other than being visually appealing, and that novelty wears off rather quickly. However, the website does contain links to other websites that Active Theory has designed, some of which the average person might find a use for. I checked the website on my mobile browser, and while it doesn't look quite as nice, the performance seems to be better, as it doesn't seem to freeze occasionally like the desktop site does. One might find this website inspiring if they are passionate about web design.

The Ugly

Best Websites Design List

While this is only a single article on a much larger website that doesn't look too bad overall, while looking for ideas for the interesting website blog posts, I stumbled across a page called "27 of the Best Website Designs to Inspire You in 2020." The irony of the hideousness of this page was too great not to include it in my post. To be honest, it isn't too bad looking for most of the page, with one exception. The kerning in the first list, that names the websites prior to describing them in another, much nicer looking list, is absolutely abysmal. The numbers and names overlap each other, and the numbers are in bold, making the first few letters of the names unreadable in a few of the cases.

It seems almost as if the creator of this page visited a website and wrote down the name in a draft to later describe it in depth, then forgot to remove the draft. Kerning is extremely important in both the visual appeal and usability of a website. While terrible kerning will certainly grab someone's attention, it is not a good type of attention. It is jarring and in extreme cases can slow down the user's ability to discern information, which can frustrate them and cause them to leave the website.

As ugly as this page is, the rest of the website actually seems somewhat competently constructed, so I wouldn't really say one should avoid it. However in the future they should better vet their authors and proofread their submissions more. The page I chose to highlight was so bad that some of it was quite literally unreadable, which should never be the case. Even a much simpler page would have been a better alternative to what they shared. The mobile version is no better than the desktop version, and there are no major differences between browsers.

Useful Site #2

Stack Exchange: https://stackexchange.com/

Stack Exchange is one of the most useful if not the most useful website I have encountered while studying for my degree. Stack Exchange is in itself a network of many smaller Q&A sites. The most commonly used website in the Stack Exchange network is Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for programmers, but some of the other ones I frequent are Super User and Server Fault. There is also another website called Webmasters, which is a subdomain of Stack Exchange and not its own domain, which I hope comes in handy with this my Web Programming class.

Stack exchange is the meeting place for a plethora of other Q&A websites on a wide array of topics, especially technical topics. If you have a computer related question, odds are it has been asked and answered somewhere in the Stack Exchange network. I use it more often than I care to admit when I'm having trouble writing code or managing my Linux and even Windows operating systems. Even today, in my Linux Administration class, I was having trouble figuring out how to give one of my users sudo rights on Debian, and thanks to Stack Exchange I realized I was making a simple mistake with the name of the group.

I would absolutely recommend that anyone with questions about technology consult this site at least on occasion. Although I do admit that it can become problematic if you rely on it as your only source of information, it is a nice fallback in case you can't find the information you're looking for anywhere else. The sheer amount of information on the website makes it a must use, and I'm almost positive that everyone in my Web Development class has used either Stack Exchange or one of its affiliate websites at least once in the past. I can't really stress how useful this site is in a bind. Even without asking a question yourself you can usually find someone else has asked it, or at least something similar enough to fill the gaps. The mobile version is a bit lackluster; the font size is a bit too small and it really just looks like a poorly scaled desktop site, but otherwise, Stack Exchange is a godsend.

Useful Site #1

Library Genesis: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

The first useful site I chose to discuss is Library Genesis. It is a search engine for articles and books. You can search by a multitude of fields, but I find the ability to search by ISBN particularly useful. The legality of the site is questionable, as it has been accused of promoting piracy, but as of yet there have been few legal consequences for the owners. I used the site to download PDFs for all of my books for this semester while I waited for the physical copies to be delivered.

The website is useful because it provides free download of information that should arguably be in the public domain. I'm not going to get too into the moral dilemma surrounding the free download of writings otherwise blocked behind a paywall, but I firmly believe that works publicly funded, or written by professors on a public payroll should be available for free. This site allows works to be downloaded via mirrors or torrent, but I wouldn't recommend torrenting anything, as that comes with its own set of security risks. Library genesis does post the hash values of all uploaded works, allowing you to check them for any malicious changes, and even allows one to search by the MD5 value.

I would definitely recommend this website for anyone who either can't afford books for school or needs fast access to a book while they are waiting on a physical copy or E-book. I can't say that there aren't risks involved with the website, as it is a Russian website with no secure connection option, but on the other hand, no sign in is required, so as long as proper precautions are taken with the files themselves, there shouldn't be much issue. I only recently learned about the existence of this website, and this is my last semester in school for the foreseeable future, so I don't know if I'll ever need it again, but I wish I had known of it when starting my academic career.

Interesting Site #2

Interesting Site #1

Hulu

The first interesting website I would like to discuss is Hulu. While hulu is very visually appealing, I find that it is a little lackluster from a functionality perspective. While it isn't too bad to use on a full PC, the mobile app and especially the console applications are hard to use. My major gripe with the website is the difficulty in navigating to a show's information page from the hulu home page. When selecting a show to watch, instead of bringing you to that show's information page, it starts playing the show, and you then have to navigate to the show's information page from the video player.

Other than some minor gripes with the website, I find it interesting because of the suggestions it makes to the user regarding shows or movies that they might enjoy. Another aspect I find interesting is that moving the mouse over the figure for a show changes that figure. Generally there are just a few words of description, the title, and then the episode number, with an image in the background, but when one hovers over the object, a more in-depth description appears, as well as the rating, and sometimes the picture displayed even changes.

I would recommend this website if you are currently a student, because subscription comes packaged with Spotify premium for only $4.99/month, but otherwise, unless you're desperate for a cheap alternative to cable, it isn't necessary. Hypothetically, if this website and other streaming services were free, I would recommend it based on content, because it has a wide selection of television shows that are generally updated within a week of airing, and if not it's only a season behind. Like I said earlier, the mobile and console applications are a bit harder to navigate, but otherwise I have no major gripes with it.