Normally it would go against every comic instinct I've ever had to explain a joke. I'd like to think that after nearly five years of experimentation, I have at least a functional idea of exactly how much information to give out and when. But this particular feature— AAlgar Online homepages— does, I think, deserve a little explanation in order to be fully appreciated.

When I began my AAlgar Corporation feature a month or two ago, I made it my goal to visit every major aspect of modern consumer/internet society and find a way to parody it. (Whether or not I've been successful thus far is an opinion I'm not qualified to have. Not without a few additional years of hindsight, anyhow.) When it came time for me to parody that everlasting staple of the world wide web— personal homepages— I knew I had a daunting task ahead of me. This wasn't one product or one webpage. This was the very backbone of the Internet— literally millions of people all being handed this incredible tool of expression simultaneously and then being left to their own devices to say something worth hearing.

Simple statistics could have predicted the eventual outcome of this situation— a whopping majority of web pages are little more than clogs in the Internet bandwidth drain, making sites with actual intelligent content stick out even more. And that's what truly makes the Internet great— we're all more or less on a level playing field here, and it's each person's job to express himself in a manner that will make him stand out from the otherwise pathetic drivel. And don't misunderstand these words as endorsements of the belief that I'm better than anyone else out there— aalgar.com really is little more than a colossal vanity project, missing only the requisite cat photos. And that's only because I don't own a cat. Yet.

But I digress. It didn't take long for me to figure out that a broad parody— some all-encompassing example of hideousness— wasn't the right approach for this particular topic. To function as a proper parody, I would have to create an entire "community" of bad webpages, a task that could take me, working on my own, months to pull off correctly. So I opened it up to a few friends, all of whom brightened with excitement at the premise I set before them.

"I want you to design the worst webpage ever," I instructed them. "Fill it with every possible cliché and bad example you can think of— tacky backgrounds, missing plug-ins, meaningless pictures... the works." As expected, most of them flaked out on me, but a few people delivered appropriately gruesome submissions. In the end, we intended to take a vote on who most deserved the title of "World's Worst Webmaster", but since only a couple of people entered (gee thanks, Dave), we just let the existing awful submissions speak for themselves.

While that initial competition has since ended, I am by no means averse to accepting more submissions. What better way to enforce the (mock) idea of an "online community" than to continue accepting submissions from now until aalgar.com no longer exists?

So if you think you have what it takes to beat what's already here, I encourage you to do so. Guidelines are practically nonexistent— my only real stipulation is that you keep the files as small as possible. My server space is limited, and I'd rather not completely fill it up with awful homepages, no matter how entertaining they may be. I also prefer you not originate any viruses from my web space. I've never met my providers, but I get the feeling they wouldn't look too kindly upon that sort of thing. Beyond that, though, sky's the limit. If you devise a page that manages to induce seizures like that one infamous episode of Pokémon, be my guest. By all means, do your worst. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.