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Site O' the Weak: Return of the Bleeding Eyes

There are plenty of ways to screw up a major corporate website. One is assaulting potential customers' eyes with ultra-vibrant color schemes and too much animation. Another is to provide useless or misleading information.

Welcome to the website for Mt. Olympus Theme Park.

For the latter problem, look no further than the Park Info section. Although we are assured that this contains "all the info you will need," it actually contains...well, very little info. On one side there are a bunch of topics that look for all the world like they would hyperlink to something useful, but all they do is show little arrows pointing to the location of said topic in the park itself. If you're clicking on "Ticket Centers," you probably want to buy tickets, and don't really care all that much where in the park you go to get some (probably the frickin' front gate) right? In defense of the park, the page does actually list contact phone number and email, and elsewhere on the site one can indeed purchase tickets and get directions...you know, useful stuff. It just seems like this page was pointless.

As for the former, it should be readily evident upon first viewing what the problems are: garish colors and loads of flashy animation screeching out of the computer screen toward you (those of us with DSL are thanking our lucky stars that this loaded with only modest delay...we're pretty sure anyone on dial-up would give up and spend their time elsewhere rather than wait for all this junk to get out of the way, which is not ideal for a website that is selling something). The way the screen boings out in a bouncing little rectangle every time you switch pages is also pretty annoying.

The most annoying thing about this site? The thing that makes this site maybe the most irritating offical amusement park site we've ever seen that doesn't belong to Six Flags? When you view the front page, you then can't use your "Back" button on your browser to return to whatever you were previously reading. What is this, a porn site? Naturally, you can retype whatever you want and navigate the hell away from this gaudy bauble of a website, but it's obnoxious and a waste of time to force visitors to do so. If you want people to buy stuff from you, it's a good idea not to be obnoxious and a waste of time. Unless you are Ann Coulter. It seems to work for her.

If you are a theme park webmaster and don't feel like being the ARN&R Site O' the Week, you have approximately one week to fix it in order to avoid the fate of Mt. Olympus. Sadly, it's already too late for them.

--JCK