Drudge Report must be one of the ugliest Web sites I’ve seen in recent years, but it still seems to be popular.
The Drudge Report Drives More Top News Traffic than Twitter or Facebook, Study Finds – The Rundo
The bad Web design must be intentional:
- It’s using a fixed-pitch font (never do that)
- Nothing relevant is shown immediately, so you have to scroll
- It has no layout to speak of
- The placement of the Google ad is atrocious
- The site doesn’t even have a title
So, why would anyone read news from this site? It’s just an ugly link farm linking to actual news.
Or is it bots that link to the news through some clever SEO setup? It would be interesting to know if news gathering is done automatically or people are involved in selecting the news.
Truly a conundrum. Are we moving backwards in time? Will Gopher eventually take over from HTTP/HTML?