A couple of posts ago, I pondered whether or not there should be some sort of Internet law, to describe the phenomenon of insane websites appearing to be designed by colourblind hippies on acid. I gave a few examples, and thanks to those of you that provided examples of your own (especially Disseisitus, Summer Seale and the indomitable Pi) I think I have a body of work sufficient to formulate the law (and thereby book my own little bit of internet immortality).

Thus, it is with pleasure that I present Haig’s Law:

The awfulness of a website’s design is directly proportional to the insanity of its contents and creator.

It should be pointed out, that many crazy sites fall foul of Haig’s Law, as well as the Timecube law, which states:

As the length of a webpage grows linearly, the likelihood of the author being a lunatic increases exponentially.

However, you can have some Timecube-type websites that are quite well – as in “it won’t make you eyes bleed in 30 seconds – such as Tom Bearden’s Zero Point Energy site.

So… why Haig’s Law? Well, the name is taken from the Haig Report website (thank you Summer Seale! Also, follow the link at your own risk!) which is a bizarre amalgamation of attacks against the creator’s family, warnings about Queensland judges and God knows what else, all thrown together in a riot of fonts, colours and recursive links. Here’s an example:

I’ll give you a few moments to get over the epileptic fit that image induced…

The scary thing is that somebody sat down, did all the coding (or point-and-clicking in Frontpage or something), sat back, and said, “That looks awesome!”

It seems to be a common trait amongst the crazy that who cares about design, just as long as I communicate the Voices in my Head to the world! Fortunately, not all of them set out to make our eyes bleed. Take George “Ancient Aliens” Tsoukalous’ site Legendary Times for example:

Nothing too horrific in the layout, but… seriously… purple, pink and mustard as a colour scheme??

Now, let’s have a look at the Star Children site. This is supposedly something to do with monitoring the rise of meta-humans or something. And judging by the picture in the middle of screen, these are the demon spawn of Satan and the kids from Village of the Damned…

Ok, so I’ve sort of eased you into this (once you’d stopped hyper-ventilating at the Haig Report), so let’s pull out some of the big guns.

In my previous post, I used Jesus-is-Lord.com as an example. Here’s a refresher for you:

Now, this site looks positively sane, when compared to its cousin “Jesus-is-Savior.com“. It’s as if the latter’s web designer, saw the former and went “I can do better!” It’s another of those sites that’s a perfect mix of Haig and Timecube laws:

Ok, I’ve given myself a headache now, so I’m going to lie down for a bit, in a darkended room.

A Notable Inclusion

Here’s a classic example of Haig’s Law at work – it’s the North Korean News Agency, so you already know it’s going to be batshit insane… and the design is so minimalistic, it looks like a screencap from QBasic…