Website Of The Week – FHM Relaunch

In this day and age of JavaScript, Shockwave and RealAudio, you would expect the relaunch of a website to be driven by the desire to throw in bundles of special effects, whizzy pictures and, to quote from a early Syd Barrett song, ‘things that make it look good’. Now, to be fair, I haven’t actually seen the previous incarnation of the FHM website, but if we are to assume that the new one (launched last week) is an improvement, the original must have been a very dull affair indeed. However, judging from Newsline‘s Website Of The Week: For Him Magazine of the first site in October 1996, it really does seem that they’ve actually made the site worse.
Obviously the core requirements of beer, women, fighting, sex and general debauchery remain intact, but the site looks flat and feels very sparse. Even Jenny McCarthy’s whopping great presence on the front page can’t fill what feels like a series of half-formed pages. There is, however, a great big dollop of sex in this site: from Position of the Week (this week: The Sliding Furrow) which is graphically and animatedly acted out by Ken and Barbie (resulting in a court case with Barbie’s ‘owners’ Mattel), to the sensitivity of our Jenny’s nipples since having a boob job. There’s also an Are You A Bloke? test, an Are You Normal? test, a How Kinky Are You? test and the somewhat surrealistic Are You A TV Character? test. Watch out for the Are You A Testcard? test.
There is quite a funny game on the site which is ostensibly based on Top Trumps, but basically boils down to which TV characters could fight other TV characters. You are given a random ‘card’ with your character on it (I got Jimmy Nail’s Spender and Del Boy) and you then choose a category with which you ‘fight’ the mystery other character. You can choose from categories like Job, Sense of Humour and Would You Mess? Spender was pretty good; I beat Phil Mitchell on Humour, quite convincingly. Del Boy wasn’t much cop though; he lost to Bergerac on Drink.
The rest of the site is full of sketchy jokes and dodgy comedy observations. A lot of material is sent in by readers themselves and tends to be tales of depravity and drunkenness. The problem with these is that they’re the kind of stories which are only really funny when you tell your mates or when you were there; somebody else’s tale of being stranded in a motorway service station with heavy gutrot is more squalid than hilarious. The readers’ responses to a previous Position of the Week, The Corkscrew, are occasionally amusing, with such offerings as: “It was great apart from she kept on complaining that I kept on stepping on her face,” and the very honest, “I think it looks stupid and difficult to do.” But the best analysis of the Corkscrew came from a Caleb Castillo, and has to be printed in full: “La tienes que tener de burro para poderla practicar de otra manera no se puede yo la intente paro la tengo gallo lo siento.” I think we all know where he’s coming from. Mexico.
There is also a purportedly international pub guide and some bargain holidays to be found in the FHM site; but on the whole, after the curves of the cover girls have started to lose their effect, the site is, to be honest, pretty dull. Let’s hope the new Dennis Launches Maxim Website website is better stuff. Strangely, as a point of interest, there seems to be only one ad on the whole site: a Ford banner at the bottom of every page.