Global Petroleum

Global Petroleum, submitted by Mkarman. It's finally happened. Someone has actually designed a site so poorly that I actually cannot bring myself to read it closely enough to figure out what the actual content is. I believe that the site is the homepage of a company that makes some sort of oil supplements for cars. I honestly don't know how close to the mark that is.

Conventional lubricants are based primarily on maintaining a high strength of the oil film itself agains breakthrough, or upon introducing a protective deposit between the moving surfaces to resist break-through.

"GLOBAL 20K ULTRA PERFORMANCE " ADDITIVE adds some entirely new and unique characteristics to lubricants.

It not only enhances the higher film strength of any lubricant but it impregnates the steel itself metallurgicallary at its mating friction surfaces. Test results show both lower friction and longer wear life to a very noticeable degree.

There you go. But it doesn't matter what the site is about. What matters is that it was apparently designed by a team of lunatics who were specially bred by geneticists for the single purpose of making the most incomprehensibly bad website known to man. This site gets the internet wrong. That's what it really boils down to. Making a web page is a test, and Global Petroleum got it wrong. The first page is huge, but it ultimately consists of one link, and two javascript abominations. There is some text that choppily gets bigger and bigger until it runs off the page and a floating image that looks like a clickable button but isn't. The front page is accompanied by an annoying little popup, even though there is a vast amount of free space on the page for that "information" to have gone. Be sure to have your speakers turned up when you visit Global Petroleum so you can be filled with the company's love for the consumer. When you access the homepage, a voice barks out "Thank you." A new page automatically loads after a few seconds, so there is no need to click the one link on the homepage.

One interesting thing about this site is that it's very concerned about its integrity. If you try to right click on an image, a warning pops up that tells you, "Security warning: this is a protected site. You can't right click. Trying again will freeze your screen!" That's a serious threat, but I use Windows XP, so I'm used to my screen freezing. I impetuously right clicked again. Lo and behold, that brings up a new message that says, "You must now restart your computer!" Actually, you don't have to restart anything. Your internet browser does actually freeze up and won't close without ctrl+alt+delete, but that's about the extent of the damage. Oddly enough, that warning doesn't appear on every page of the site. On some pages, you can right click on whatever you damn well please, which is how I managed to procure this beautiful graphic:

The above picture is called "Marketing" for some reason. It doesn't exactly scream "marketing" to me, but then, I'm not in the petroleum business. The site seems to be constructed in the interest of creating as many new pages as possible, each one more insane than the last. Some speak to you, other use all manners of annoying gifs, others have scrolling text or flying images that either make it next to impossible to actually read the content of the page or cause the borders of the page to stretch, making your browser window scroll all over the place. Some of the links open up new browser windows when the content isn't nearly large enough to justify it, others don't even though it would have made sense. Then there's this doozy. Wait for it to load all the way. It may actually be the worst single page ever created. All in all, Global Petroleum is like a Rubik's cube where every tile is a different color - the more you try to make sense of it, the more frustrating it becomes until you want to throw it against a wall and watch all of the plastic squares fly all over the place. Don't try to see everything in one sitting. Your poor, delicate human brain won't be able to withstand the strain. Mine sure as hell couldn't.

Oh, there's also a guestbook. I'm not sure why an oil site would really need a guestbook, but there it is. Yaybo.

– Ben "Greasnin" Platt