The main two sites that I write at (besides my own) are Helium and Associated Content. Lately I’ve been looking around for other similar sites, so that I could test them out and review them.

The other day I came across something truly disturbing in the way of online writing. I stumbled on the website Senserely.

It was kind of like a train wreck – it was horrifying, but I had to keep looking around just to see if it could get any worse.

The website, like other online websites, works on a basic premise: you write an article, they host the article, you split the ad revenues. The topic of the site is supposed to be AdSense and similar items.

On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a horrible idea. Helium, Associated Content, and other sites have been working fine. But none have looked quite as disgusting as Senserely.

The layout of the site is horrible. It’s completely bogged down with ads – with three large square blocks and three rows of text ads before any content appears. The color scheme doesn’t mesh well, and the content is near un-findable under the mountain of ads.

The site is also incredibly slow to load. The site is built on top of a table based layout, with markup that doesn’t come close to passing validation. Between the poor design and the load of javascript advertisements, it takes quite some time for the page to load and for me to be able to scroll around.

Go check it out for a minute. You’ll get a good laugh out of it. I couldn’t even bring myself to sign up and get a referral id – I’d feel a little bit dirty about actually referring someone to this site and recommending that you sign up.

Bottom line – check it out for a laugh, and then run far far away. You can get similar functionality – with a better layout and better search engine placement – through Associated Content and Xomba.