Submitted by johnh on November 21, 2008 - 04:33.

The Golden Spiders were dished out over four hours ago, not that you'd know this from reading their website, which doesn't have the winners on it.

If anything was about to wake me from my long blog-coma, the bile that rises every time this list comes out was sure to be it, of course. In previous years -- to pluck one example out of thin air -- they dished out a Best Government Site award to Cork City Council, whose website not only failed to render at all in Firefox but then continued not to do so for another two years after the award.

Here's to the 2008 winners, then:

Congratulations first of all to Toyota, for winning Best Retail and Home Shopping Website with a site with no facility at all to actually purchase even so much as an air freshener.

Secondly, an honourable mention to TV3. Not only does it have an achingly-unresponsive Flash widget front and centre, but it contains a five-button navigation widget to choose between the highlighted items thereon. You can click on those five little squares until the cows come home, safe in the knowledge that it won't actually do anything at all.

Extra points to TV3 for having a horizontal scrollbar to help people with a 1024px-wide monitor and a fully-maximised browser reach the extra hundred pixels or so of fuck-all over to the right hand side of the site. And adding the facility to register without giving any reason whatsoever as to why on earth anybody would want to. Surely it's not simply so I can be spammed, right? Right?

On, finally, to Ordnance Survey Ireland, proud winners of the Best E-Government Website award for 2008.

The link's here. Or at least it would be if the domain without 'www' in front didn't result in a DNS failure. Epic Win!

Try this one instead.

"Looking for an address?" it says cheerfully on the front page. "Try our new interactive map!".

Alright then:

Oh, it's telling me I need to use Firefox instead of Mozilla 1.0. Which would be fair enough, if I wasn't using Firefox 3.

Onward, though. Let's try "looking for an address" then, shall we? First of all, spend as long as you like looking for somewhere to enter that address on the resulting page. It took me about five minutes.

For those playing along at home: click on the eye-bleedingly-small 'search' link hiding in grey-on-black ALL-CAPS type in a black box on the right hand side of the screen. When another dark-grey-on-black box appears, make sure to click and drag it by the title bar some distance over to the left so you can actually read what's coming next, since in its default position it just helpfully spits stuff out invisibly underneath the menu instead.

Next, start typing out a street address into its input box. Between that box and the utterly unnecessary internal-use-only debug code dump, if you pay attention and don't type too much of your address in, you may see the address you're looking for appear. At this point, whatever you do, DON'T click on the box marked 'Search' right next to where you've been typing. Because it doesn't do anything at all. Instead, click on the address in the list below. Or double click. Just keep trying one or both of those until something eventually happens.

Et Voilà! Finally it shows you the address you've been looking for!

Well, no.

Actually what you get is a map of the address you're looking for, with your search result helpfully not signposted in any manner whatsoever. The thing you were looking for is roughly in the middle of the map though. Surrounded by about twenty square miles of its surrounding area.

It's fucking great.

Go Golden Spiders! That's the best stuff from 2008. Thank fuck it's 2009 in five and a half weeks' time.

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