Moneydick

I spend most of time in the shinyness of web 2.0. A glittery, raised text, and ajaxy valley of opportunity. I’ve got my 208 rss’d sites, and I tend to give sites with names like meebo my complete trust and adoration. But sometimes I wander into web $.7, a world of highlighted text and paypal screenshots.
Like watching an old commercial, entering the back alley where ‘information products’ are sold makes you feel like you’ve been through this pain before. This is trodden territory in web design. It sucked then, and it sucks now. Repeating backgrounds with dollar signs? “AMAZING OFFERS,” and more shitty shitty shit shit. Here’s a wee sample:

It’s a whole different world out there guys. Sadly, this must mean that the split tests have shown that the average credit card account holder prefers the arrow.gif(s) in your faceness with an extra helping of a design rhetoric that expired a long time ago. This is not where advertising has taken us. We have to go back a long time to find the types of styling in the internet marketer’s toolkit. Let’s use the wayback machine to see when Apple.com looked like this: 1997

1997. Like 2,000 B.C. in Cybertime.