YNot Advertising creates websites offering easy ordering from restaurants in college towns.  I just visited my local site (lionmenus.com) to order some pizza and found that they'd redesigned since my last visit.  I also found that none of the links on the front page worked, resulting in a nice ASP.NET traceback.  Since not even the "contact us" link worked, I emailed the WHOIS contact for the domain who promptly emailed back and seemed surprised since apparently this was not the case for him.  I then realized that I'd disabled referrers in Firefox - re-enable them and boom (goes the dynamite), everything works.

So all the links on their site are javascript, and require referrers.  Nice.  I can't even open stuff in tabs to compare menus.  The source of the front page is amusing... like large chunks of percent encoded html stuffed inside input tag values.  This seems like possibly not the best design.  But hey, I'm not a web developer.

Plus the site is brand new and page loads are pretty slow.  Granted, the old version wasn't exceptionally fast either.

 Besides the site being slow (which is typical for poor javascript / AJAX programmers) I don't really see a wtf here.  Personally I like the site and think its a great idea.  I searched for Calazones and it showed me all of the places that I could order from.  I then went to their menu and could order BAM!  Pretty neat.

Oh, the idea is great, I use the site frequently.  I just found the all-javascript referrer-based linking scheme and the percent-encoded html in input values to be a WTF.  Or is this the norm for sites these days?

 Feel free to try the website of my local pawn shop. I assume it's 2.0 because it's inaccessible. I think the designer just hates people.

wildkard:

 Feel free to try the website of my local pawn shop. I assume it's 2.0 because it's inaccessible. I think the designer just hates people.

 

I like how the images are just uncompressed high-resolution images "made smaller" with the width and height attributes of IMG. Very proffesional indeed, this way you'll insure visitors can always look up high-res images if they want to take a closer look!

wildkard:

 Feel free to try the website of my local pawn shop. I assume it's 2.0 because it's inaccessible. I think the designer just hates people.

Ouch! You could have warned me that they start playing some pretty loud music immediately on opening the page. Cough!

 Auto-starting music on a page is one of those deadly sins of web design that makes me immediately hate the designer, no matter how good the rest of the site is.

wildkard:

 Feel free to try the website of my local pawn shop. I assume it's 2.0 because it's inaccessible. I think the designer just hates people.

I thought we left "play music upon visiting my page" back in the 90s.

belgariontheking:

I thought we left "play music upon visiting my page" back in the 90s.

 

True, but some people are still there as well.

TheRider:

Ouch! You could have warned me that they start playing some pretty loud music immediately on opening the page. Cough!

 

Heh sorry I forgot about that because I think I removed the bit in firefox that plays midis and wavs. On the other hand... it crashes my FF 3.x installs on multiple (not all) machines so.... I could have warned you about that.

belgariontheking:

wildkard:

 Feel free to try the website of my local pawn shop. I assume it's 2.0 because it's inaccessible. I think the designer just hates people.

I thought we left "play music upon visiting my page" back in the 90s.

A local interstate bus service has music turned on by default on its main site. It was a "feature" they added... said feature woke up everyone at my uncle's house when I was buying my return tickets at 2am.

How long 'till the "WELCOME TO THE FIRST XXX SITE WITH SOUND!" joke becomes a reality?

danixdefcon5:

How long 'till the "WELCOME TO THE FIRST XXX SITE WITH SOUND!" joke becomes a reality?

 

I know of at least one webcam site that features sound in their POPUNDER ADVERTISEMENTS, which happen to (purportedly) include a live webcam feed (usually of some chick sitting there typing) with goddamned audio.

 Thus I will be sitting there on the video site du jour, taking care of business. The video ends, and I'm sitting there in the silence, and hear faint clicking noises not entirely unlike a keyboard, but it obviously can't be a keyboard because mine makes a hell of a lot more noise than that and I'm not typing anyway. It takes me a good 2 or 3 minutes to remember the freaking popunder and close it.