The Worst
Thanks to Charles Waud of Waudware for his nomination of rogerart.com. This is an artist's site with an anarchist style, so I'm giving it lots of latitude. However, he is trying to sell his art too, so the rules still apply. There are many obstacles to getting the artist's message across. Here are a few:

* run-on pages - The home page goes on forever ... and ever ... and ever! This is an extreme case, but remember that viewers inevitably give up on pages that require them to scroll down more than one or two screens.
* poor navigation - So, where do you go once you get there? Many of the images are links but go nowhere. Much of the text is underlined for emphasis. Is it a link or not? Who knows! If there are other links, you probably can't find them. Which leads me to
* text styles - or lack of them cause confusion. In this site the use of multiple colours, sizes and styles - even within a single sentence - is reflective of his anarchistic style, but results in a page that is so overwhelming it is never read. As far as I'm concerned, no readers, no message. Remember the K.I.S.S. principle.

The runner up award for worst goes to a business in Burlington that distributed a post card inside the local paper. With text in Times New Roman (Eew!) and one small dingbat smiley face they invited me to an open house, told me they had a special of some sort, but never told me what kind of business it is. Is it a plumber or a spa? I'm not going to check it out if I don't know. That was a waste of advertising dollars.

The Best
Earlier this year I received a direct mail post card. It was brilliant in its simplicity! On the front was a close-cropped full colour image of a young man's face. The heading - not too big and placed right beside the eyes, where a reader is instinctively drawn - said, "I wish I were as smart as Craig Fairley". Woah! Seeing my name in the layout caught me. I was hooked! I had to turn it over to find out more. This post card was from a company that specializes in variable printing, a digital print process that customizes each copy in the print run according to a mailing list - in effect, a mail merge. The difference is that the information isn't just printed on top of a design, it is a part of the design. And the images can vary, too. So, the guy can be a girl when the recipient is female. Kudos to this company for effectively demonstrating not only what they do, but doing it extremely well. They proved their point.