An Anecdote.

From an archived www.bbc.co.uk blog page.

At 06:08 PM on 08 Nov 2007, Peet McKimmie wrote:

Many years ago, when I was "signing on", I had "web design" listed as one of my skills. I was sent for a job interview to a small corner shop who had a website.

This was in the mid-1990s. The woman who ran the website was convinced they would make their fortune, if they could only put in a link banner to every affiliate site on the whole internet.

The site was called, I kid you not, "www.cornershoptardis.co.uk". Thankfully, no trace of it remains. (Yes, I know it infringed on the BBC's IP. I tried to explain that to her, but was met with blank stares - to her, "Tardis" was just "a word that everybody had heard of"...)

When I saw it, the structure of the site was a front page with an animated GIF of the TARDIS that took about five minutes to load by modem (I'm not kidding; she only ever looked at it on her local machine) linked to twenty or more sub-pages filled with standard banner links - no actual content of her own.

I was in a bad position. If I turned the job down, I would lose my benefit. If I took the job, I would have to gouge my own eyes out. In the end, I came up with a compromise...

I asked her if I could think about it over the weekend. On the Monday I returned with a twenty-page "deconstruction" of the site and all its problems. She read the first page and a half before telling me I wasn't "suited" to her pet project. :-)

About nothing remaining of the site, he was right. Probably. All that the Wayback Machine archived of it was the fact it had a "robots.txt". It presumably told the bots to bug off.

It might not even have been the same site, because the archive was from 2007, not the 90s.