This Startup Made Its Homepage Look Terrible To Advertise The Need To Hire A New Designer

Right now, the homepage of Betabrand has all the elements of one of the worst websites you've ever seen: horrendous colors, a popup asking for your email (that swears its not for spam purposes), and terrible GIF animations and fonts likely ripped right from the now defunct pages of Geocities.

The reason: they really need to hire a User interface/experience designer and decided to "do something a little more... bold," according to a post on Reddit.

"We're going to have a terrible, terrible version of our home page live for a day and a half in the hopes that it will find its way in front of web designers that get the joke," Chris Lindland, cofounder of the San Francisco ecommerce clothing company, told Fast Company.

The company only changed the homepage, not the rest of the site, so it doesn't seem worried about any effect on sales.

From the Reddit post:

"So far our stunt has attracted thousands of hits -- we might break our all-time traffic record today -- as well as tons and tons of qualified candidates submitting resumes (I'm not in charge of hiring, but I hear it's dozens just today).

It was a big risk, but it's paying off. We are almost certainly going to get a better candidate than we would have otherwise. A lot of big names are tweeting about us to their many, many designer friends."

Now check out the homepage, if you dare >