Visitors were browsing the website of St. Isidore Parish in Green Bay, WI when they noticed something peculiar.
The travelers, Ron and Denise McCulkin, were having trouble displaying the webpage on their phones. The website was very zoomed in, so that all that was visible on their mobile screens were “Find us on AltaVista!”
“That explained it,” Ron, 78, told The Daily Inquisition. “If the website hasn’t been updated since AltaVista was popular in the late 90s, I shouldn’t expect it to be optimized for my iPhone 14 operating system.”
Founded in 1995, AltaVista was the first and most popular internet search engine throughout the 1990s. However, after a failed redesign it quickly lost market share to Google and similar search competitors, eventually being bought out and practically shut down in 2003.
“Ugh, what is this, 1999?” Denise, 72, groaned. “I bet they haven’t even optimized their metadata for web crawler indexing yet.” She pulled out her Google pixel to tweet a complaint, but soon realized the parish was not on social media.
The Daily Inquisition found that many people had sent complaints to the pastor, Fr. Dan Dresenski, about the quality of their website. But the aged priest seemed uninterested, content with the mere existence of the website.
“We’re one of the most visited Catholic churches in the area because we have a website,” he told us. “The other parishes still rely on Yellow Pages for contact information!”
The McCulkins soon gave up trying to find the parish’s Mass times after multiple failed attempts to get it to load on their devices. They opted instead to go to the nearby Lutheran church, which at least had a Myspace page.
