September 19, 2007

Don't look now - it's London BNP!

In ancient days of yore (the 1990s to you and me) the World Wide Web was awash with garish websites created by 15 year-old boys who had little to say but who wanted to say it VERY LOUDLY, and to that end in their thousands they downloaded their free copies of Netscape Navigator, which came with an inbuilt WYSIWYG HTML editor called Composer. Not loved at all by professionals, Composer had the quirk that it never closed paragraph tags, so there was always a gap between the main body of a paragraph and its last line. But with Composer you could create frames and nested tables to your heart's delight, and fill them out with ultra-bright colours and thick blocky text - et voila! there you were on Geocities with your own glaring web atrocity sitting at the end of a long and unmemorable URL that took forever to load.

Things moved on, of course - CSS and standards such as PHP came along to revolutionise web design, and coding in HTML alone became old hat, but thousands of those early abominations remain, hanging lifeless and forgotten on the Internet, relics of a by-gone era, testaments to rotten design and over-enthusiastic coding.

Unless you're the Old Major knocking up the online village newsletter on an obsolete copy of Frontpage you really wouldn't code that way today, not unless you had a real yearning for the 1990s and were determined to achieve that so not-in-vogue retro look - tables, frames, blocky text, screaming colours and all.

Or unless you're the clueless London BNP, which has managed - despite great obstacles (taste being one of them) - to come up with a website so dreadful that it really wouldn't look out of place amongst the worst of Geocities circa 1996. And that is saying something!

Now I'll let you into a little secret. Antifascist didn't want to write this up because he's colour blind. Unfortunately, so am I! It seems, however, that the person responsible for the London BNP's website suffers the affliction to a degree so unusual that even our enfeebled eyes watered uncontrollably as his melange of gaudy colour and stone-age design rendered on our monitors like a plateful of melting Smarties. A real blast from the Internet past, we speculated at length on whether or not the author of this dog's dinner was wearing a shell-suit as he tapped out his TDs, TRs, DIVs and non-breaking spacess, bolstered by the conviction that London BNP's website would proudly take its place alongside London Conservatives, London Labour and London Liberal Democrats and blow away their amateurish efforts.

Alas, the result of all that toil is a tawdry website that is an object lesson in irredeemably bad design and execution, the anithesis of everything a political website should be, striking only for its nausea-inducing effect upon the hapless visitor. With content (a word we use loosely) presented in thick black Times New Roman and written in the BNP's proprietory brand of mangled syntax ("There was several lefty-liberal types and local Muslims present..."), London BNP has come up with a website that is an instant museum piece, definitely one for the connoisseurs of all things tacky to pore over for hours at a stretch (maybe asking themselves, Why?).

Perhaps the only good thing to say about it is that in true retro fashion it has links to non-existent items, including a video of Dickie Barnbrooke addressing the London electorate. Mercifully, you don't get to see the video (it's non-existent, remember?) but you can ring Dickie to make a donation (not so retro there, then!), or you can click a link to make a donation. Or not, because the link leads to an empty page - not quite the thing you want when you've got an urgent £200,000 campaign appeal on the go.

The kindest response to the London BNP website that we've seen so far was posted on the nazi Stormfront forum: "Oh my Lord! My eyes! My eyes!"

It's hard to have sympathy with a Nazi, but we really do feel his pain...

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

Talk about an eyesore! Mark Collett (graphic design guru - hahahahaha) strikes again!

Anonymous said...

Oh my God, it's ghastly. I wonder which style guru created it.

Anonymous said...

bet he's got an avocado bathroom suite . . .

Anonymous said...

I thought it was just my age, but thank you for the explanation, i did wonder why i felt seasick.

Anonymous said...

i hear on the grapevine that their bid for London was officially launched in a well known Dagenham wateringhole on Monday evening, griffin put in an appearance to give his knuckledragging troops the rallying cry.

He left very quickly after the collection went round, last seen running out of the pub door shoving fivers in his pocket. The muppets wont learn will they, if Dicky is daft enough to believe he will see any of that money to pay for his election campaign he really is away with the fairies.

Anonymous said...

What a poultice. Why don't they just grab a blog?

Sorry to be pedantic, but it was Netscape Communicator. Navigator and Composer were part of it and you got an email client as well. We used it at college on *nix machines. It was bloody awful. Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I'd forgotten the days when every other website looked like the BNP's, but better!

Anonymous said...

There is a profile of Dickie Barnbrook on the site in which he boasts of being a "Streetleader" for his local council "which involves removing graffiti, antisocial behaviour and other forms of vandalism from South East London".

Funny that because he's the BNP group leader on Barking and Dagenham council in North East London and claimed to live there to stand as a candidate.

Anonymous said...

anon said....there is a profile of...thereby hangs a tale, yes Dicky lives in Lewisham, and did so in 2006, during the local elections, but he rented a flat in barking town centre, we all knew he wasnt living there, but the powers to be at the time......the same as his second Bailey comes from up north somewhere got caught living in a caravan in the town centre.

As far as we know Dicky still lives in Lewisham, and as for the title Streetleader that was a knuckledraggers spelling mistake it should read Streetwalker.

Anonymous said...

Whats the London website got to do with Lancaster. Somebody put a lot of work into that site and its does it's job of giving the people the TRUTH. Its had THOUSANDS of visitor's for your information and so what, how many of your Websites look as good as that. The London BNP had to start somewhere and it will get better.

Antifascist said...

'how many of your Websites look as good as that'

You're kidding right? Or is it a trick question?

'it will get better'

Believe me, it couldn't get much worse.

Unknown said...

The London BNP had to start somewhere

True, but 1996 wasn't the best place to start from.

Its had THOUSANDS of visitor's

Of course it has - it's a joke, and people have to see it before they'll believe it.

***Shameless plug***

Try this - much nicer (and we can place an apostrophe, too):

http://www.voiceofreason.org.uk/blog/

Anonymous said...

Yup the Nutzies are doing thier best -

Actually A little bird (or proper tester) suggests that the Nutzies
are using "Hot Metal" a free HTML writer wot has been about for a number of years.

Shows how incompetant the Nutzies are.

On the Septic Tank side - Hotmetal is OK but the KKK or Klaverners are straight into the special file, or bin

Anonymous said...

The site looks OK to me, a bit basic but very functional.

All the links worked fine, and with a few more fonts, and a bit less glary colour, it will look good.

WE can't all be professional web designers, can we?

Anonymous said...

Thousands of visitors. Yeah, all laughing their ducks off you moron.

Anonymous said...

croydon bnp said...we had to start somewhere...well i suppose when you are climbing out of the primordial ooze you have a point. but do come on Londoners expect a little more than what an average 6 year old can do blindfolded.

Anonymous said...

The site looks OK to me, a bit basic but very functional.All the links worked fine, and with a few more fonts, and a bit less glary colour, it will look good.
--------------

You mean just change everything and it will be fine?

Anonymous said...

further info has come to light on the meeting held on Monday last to launch Dickys bid to become Mayor, it seems that there were 2 very generous donors in the audience 1 handed over £5000 the other £1000 Nick Griffin left with a big smile on his face and his pockets bulging.
Bet these contributions dont make it on the books.

further info to follow.

Anonymous said...

What have you been up to Denise? There's a real dogfight going on on Stormfront. Look for the Voice Of Reason Loses It thread in politics :) :) :)

Anonymous said...

It really looks dreadful - maybe we shouldn't tell them though?

If they looked professional more people might vote for them!

Unknown said...

What have you been up to Denise?

Throw a dog a bone... well it smoked the little weasel out, didn't it?

Anonymous said...

hi denise, please share, i cant get onto stormfront.......

by the way further info on dickys launch on monday to his 'adoring public' his words not mine, he is now promoting violence towards children and young people according to dicky a clip round the ear or a slap round the head never hurt anyone.

i wonder how many times his mother slapped him stupid because he does have trouble reading his script.

Unknown said...

Hi anon.

It was something and nothing. Stormfront poster Brighton Rock is a lying little racist toad who did the BNP no favours at all by abusing all and sundry on the Oxfordshire and Brighton Argus forums, and finally so badly wrecked the Argus forum that it was closed down. The old posters started up their own racist-free forum which I'm happy to say is a great success.

As I was closing down the old version of VoR I thought I'd bait Brighton Rock with something I knew he'd be afraid other Stormfronters would read, and as I know he's a whining wretch I also knew he'd take it there to try to defend himself, which he did.

As it seems he's made enemies on SF too he got ripped into by one of them and was made to look a bigger idiot than he already is with every succeeding post.

It turns out he wasn't even in the BNP when he was earning them so much bad publicity, but he claims he's now joined as a result of my blog. As I said, he is a lying little toad, so that's probably for Stormfront consumption.

Anyway, nothing of any real importance, just me getting one over on a deserving case... or should I say, setting the trail by which the deserving case got one over on himself?

:-)

Anonymous said...

thanks Denise for the explanation, i do enjoy a great mystery, and you should enjoy the victory.