This is the front page of McDonald's, or as the                company is more commonly known, "Your Dalmatian Location." There's not much of a point to this page other than to ask one very salient question: Did you know ... more than 11 miles of thread holds the giant Arch Deluxe burger in place. (The web designer was                unable to locate the question mark key.) No indication is given as to what a                "giant Arch Deluxe burger" is, but it sounds pretty                appetizing as long as you pick around all the thread. I am sort of                disappointed they didn't reveal exactly how many miles of ground-up                Dalmatians were used to make this delicious treat, or ask a question                I knew the answer to, such as one about how many                inches of pubic hair are used to make a Big Mac sandwich (two inches).

Thisis page 2 of McDonald's. Here we have the rare opportunity to readMcDonald's fine print, but if for some reason that doesn't fascinateyou there are a few other options. You may 1) Look at the (extremelyshitty) drawing featuring seven retarded children pressing their faceup against the window in an apparent attempt to escape McDonald's, or2) Decide whether you want to "enter the website" as a Grown-up or aChild. You mean to tell me we still haven't actually entered thewebsite? You realize that in 1996 each of these pages would have takentwenty minutes to load? Where is the actual website? Is there an actualwebsite?

I clicked on both the Adult and Kids entrances, but                they inexplicably led me to the exact same place, which is to                another shitty drawing. By this time it was pretty obvious that I                was being dicked around.

Web design in 1996 is very easy--you just format a page however you want and say, "Please open your window to the width of this line of text." No, don't worry what type of monitor your visitors have. They won't be seeing any awkward white space so long as they manually line up their windows to a specified line of text like the little jackasses they are. If they're so intent on preening around with their own specialty window size they can go make their own goddamned website. Looking for a professionalweb design agency or to improve your search engine rankings? Check out Teknicks, the leading SEO agency and Interactive web firm.

Accounting for disparate visitors is far too big a                headache when you're working with such complex variables as JPEGs,                fonts, and hyperlinks. That's why most websites from this time will                also recommend which browser, operating system, and monitor                resolution you use. Unless your settings are exactly the same as the                web designer's, you might as well go fuck yourself.

You'll notice a few things about Bestbuy.com. The firstthing is that although Best Buy has cornered the market on computers,their website looks like complete ass. The second is that they, too,are obsessed with Dalmatians, going so far as to include an "101Dalmatians Holiday Savings Coupon Book." Sounds pretty good, but notgood enough to reward Best Buy with the annual "Your DalmatianLocation" trophy. The last thing you will notice about this website isthat there is a pig on the left who is giving us a gift. When Iactually visited the website, he was animated: he pulled out the giftfrom behind his back and then presented it to me, as if I was supposedto know who the fuck he was and why I had made his gift list. Next timeI'm in 1996 remind me to never visit Bestbuy.com.

The highlight of this website is their "delicious time saving turkey stuffing recipe featuring....you guessed it! Slyders!!!!!!!" Wow, I didn't guess that at all. What the hell is a Slyder? What I can guess is that if you would ever consider making your Thanksgiving stuffing out of White Castle food, you probably didn't have access to the internet in 1996. In fact, chances are pretty good that you don't have internet access now and that you are in fact a hobo.

Oh God. Oh dear God in heaven no. Your first                instinct will be to repeatedly jab a pinecone in your eyes, but                please try to understand Pepsi's mindset. First, they were almost                definitely drunk. Secondly, they knew that the internet was in some                way related to computers, so the idea was to make their website very                evocative of a computer. I'm not convinced they understood what a                computer was, but when they closed their eyes and thought about                computers, this monstrosity is what popped into their drunken heads.

First you have a background which looks like a piece                of graph paper after it has been used to smash up a family of frogs. On top of this is a sort of                three-dimensional computer terminal, as if the fact that you're                using an actual computer to view the website isn't quite "computery" enough. In the                center of this is                something called "Pepsi World," which has just exploded. All                of these elements combine to give me a kind of headache that is very                small but will never go away.

The only part of this website that I liked is the                              what's new page. You can tell Pepsi knows what is new just by                looking at their cutting-edge "what's new" logo:

You might be confused why I checked out Clorox.com, since such a website has no reason existing now let alone in 1996. It's because there was a jug of Clorox in the corner of my eye while I was finding websites for this article. But it turns out that Clorox.com is a great website. If you were ever curious as to what the internet would have looked like had it been around in 1953, this is it. You'd have a funny little mascot whose body is whatever cockamamie product you're selling, you'd have a few innocuous links for investors, and then you'd pretty much be done. And that concludes the only review of Clorox's 1996 website that will ever be written in the history of time by any person in the world.

What font is this? Who are we kidding here, Coke? You're not cool, you're a big joke and everybody hates your website. I read the text and was amazed that Coke has the audacity to mock its old 19th-century slogans. The irony here is that "Drink Coca-Cola" is a compelling, understated motto, yet this very website advertisement is an affected, pandering display of inanity. They should really delete the entire thing and just include the sentence "Drink Coca-Cola!" in 12-point font because there is no value to CocaCola.com in 1996 or 2006, and to me their soft drink is the same shit Pepsi sells but in a different can and the only way to drink either is to mix them with rum so that you can forget for a moment that all you're drinking is high-fructose corn syrup and water, and that every can of Coke you purchase merely encourages Coca-Cola's shit-eating advertising agency.

As best as I can gather, the premise for Nickelodeon's website is that Natalie is moving across the country and is feeling mighty gloomy, so she decides to set up the world's first video podcast. Right, Natalie. Just tell me one thing: How in the hell are you going to put on a web show, from the back of a car, in 1997? And why exactly is it going to take three months for your family to move across the country? And isn't it probably true that Natalie was conceived in the same backseat 13 years ago? Where's that show, Nickelodeon? Why won't you talk about that show?

There is very little I can say to rebuke this website.This is the best website I've ever seen. I navigated further into theworld of Lego.com '96 and on every single page I was greeted by pirateswaving swords, knights riding horses, and overarchingly wizards onbicycles.This page alone has three wizards on bicycles lined up in a very majestic fashion, with an additional bonus wizard on a bicycle in the upper-right corner.  

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In 1996, while most companies were still figuring out how to properly scan their company logo so that it didn't look like a joke, Lego had discovered the key to web design, which is that randomly strewing little Lego men around one's website is hilarious and engaging. If you feel like you need to cleanse your palette after seeing all the other websites featured in this article, please enjoy the following line of Lego men:

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