I am going to explore the notion that bad html can indeed be a trendy viral marketing ploy which attracts a special, light-hearted demographic and achieves mass popularity. I shall provide some samples from my trip to the vast junkyards of the world wide web to justify my aforementioned statement to all who don't believe me.

If you know me well, then you'll know my two favourite things to do at work are:

1. Drawing Diagrams

2. Making Lists

With that in mind, let me start with a diagram which helps explain what I mean by popularly bad html:

The sites I will be talking about are those that are successful, out of the box and quite useless in terms of either usability or functionality.

Now some may call it bizarre that these sites have become popular but I believe it is ingenious marketing which brings about many advantages. Let's dive straight into it and I'll show you what I mean.

Dom's Bad HTML Sample Sites:

1. homestarrunner/sbsite – This site provides a lesson on 'what not to do when building a website' trying to achieve examples of bad load times, ridiculous colour selection, frames and useless content. Funnily enough this site was majorly popular for the novelty of it's awfulness and I'm sure it got a lot more hits than its broken hit counter states (Hint: resize the browser window and see what happens to the middle frame). The site doesn't really look at capitalising on its popularity, only providing a promotion to the renowned creator “strong bad”. Useless website? Sure is.

2. The best page in the universe- Warning: This guy speaks his mind and uses coarse language in some instances to make a point. At one point in time I was addicted to reading his views on the world because they brought so much humour and surprisingly made sense in its own twisted way. The website is ugly, plain and makes my eyes burn but the content is pure gold in my opinion (and to 2,928,863 others apparently but I'm not sure if that counter is dynamic or a made up number). The site owner doesn't look to make money off his website and has declined lucrative advertisement offers and I believe this has maintained the site's popularity. Genius? In its own special way, yes.

3. MSY – This one takes the cake in my opinion. An awful website which holds the reputation of a company looking to increase financial turnover. This site provides the worst layout, the worst colours, the worst navigation and is frustratingly hard to use, yet their site is incredibly well known and business is booming due to their cheap products and their website to match. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine in marketing and I said to him “What kind of an IT business keeps such a terrible website. I bet half the guys that work at the counter of MSY can make professional looking websites at almost no cost” to which he replied, “but you're talking about how bad the website is to me and I haven't even heard of them until now. First thing I will do is look at their website and probably even buy some computer parts if they're as cheap as you said they were”. I have heard similar arguments from others too who stated, well they can keep their cheap prices because they don't spend all their money on their website. Their unwillingness to upgrade their website, I believe has helped in their popularity (keeping in mind there is no such thing as negative publicity).

So, can bad html be trendy? The answer is..... maybe depending on the blending factors of:

1. Is it a lateral idea? Innovative? Unique? Something no one has thought of?

2. Is the content rich? Memorable? Worthy of telling your friends?

3. Does it maintain its primary novelty factor? (Does MSY remain cheap? Does the best site in the universe stay ad free? Does homestar runner maintain its pointless frames and broken hit counter?)

Now to leave you on a high note. Here is a sample of a website that doesn't quite fall in the bucket of bad html but opened my eyes to the power of viral marketing. Badgerbadgerbadger.com first started playing on my friend's computer in a computer lab at university, he soon sent it to me and this soon spread to every computer in the computer lab. The lab transformed into a rave party environment and had everyone doing the badger dance (Hint: Turn up the volume).