1000 Monkeys Designing Websites

I’ve often won­dered what would hap­pen if you chained a thou­sand mon­keys to a thou­sand lap­tops run­ning a thou­sand copies of Front­page for a few years. I no longer need to wonder.

Wel­come to the Vil­lage of Arcade, NY. Where the peo­ple all know the other peo­ple and the best web designer in the town is a mon­key. I know times are tough, and I know the econ­omy is in the toi­let, but this is just a touch on the ridicu­lous side. A munic­i­pal­ity that can’t have a decent web designer do up a page or two is either seri­ously broke, or they had a con­test to see who had the smartest farm ani­mal.

The town obvi­ously revolves around trains (after the first six rep­e­ti­tions of that damned train whis­tle I unplugged the power to my speak­ers). The big train track at the top of the “main page” is a dead give­away. That and the fact that they did an “extreme train makeover” and from the pic­tures, the whole town showed. Granted, it was for a great cause and all that, but this was the biggest thing that will hap­pen here forever.

Whats with the train whistle?

They link to what I can only assume is every busi­ness in their area from the “busi­nesses” page. The per­son doing the link­ing must have seen the other pages. In so doing, he should have real­ized that the page from which he was link­ing sucked. It’s almost funny that the local Cham­ber of Com­merce site is actu­ally pass­able and looks like some­one got paid to do it.

Then we have the police and fire pages. Noth­ing that says “secu­rity” like hav­ing all the town police listed on the web­site by name. They also have both of the town per­verts listed (LMAO, yeah… two). The fire page has this obnox­ious firetruck speed­ing to a fire, spray­ing it and leav­ing only to have to return again because they never quite suc­ceed in putting out the fire (I don’t know if that’s the right mes­sage to send, folks). It links to their “real” fire depart­ment page, which is hosted on Geoc­i­ties. I’m stunned…

If I find out that that a local kid did the site I won’t feel bad, but I will won­der who made the call that this was OK. I would have to assume that there was some kind of con­test or some­thing. In the event of a con­test, this was the best the town’s chil­dren could do? No, I think some­one in the Mayor’s office was forced to put this together on pain of fir­ing. The mayor, accord­ing to the pic­ture on the main page, resem­bles a blue avo­cado on two tooth­picks, by the way.

Any civil employee that can learn how to do all the bad stuff on this site would have had an eas­ier time learn­ing Word­Press, and the result would have been a far cry bet­ter. Men­tal note: When next I find myself in upstate New York, stop at the Gray Fox Pub to laugh at the townsfolk.

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