Friday, December 12, 2008
Web Sites
I spend a lot of time on the web, both at work and at home and I've come up with some stuff that really bugs me about sites. In fact, many times I'll just close the page if some of this stuff happens. If you're a site developer and happen to read this, you might take some hints. I hardly think I'm the only one who this stuff really bugs.
Noisy pages - I don't mind opting in for sound, but I really hate sound sneaking up on me.
Ads - for the most part I don't mind ads. I understand that for you to put stuff up I like, you need to get some advertising revenue. However, there are ads and there are ads. I really dislike those that cover a page and either don't go away, or are hard to close. I'll usually leave a page that has a noisy ad. I hate those extra ads that appear behind the browser. I guarantee I'll close every one before I read it. And if I do see the product, I'll do my best to never use it.
Multi-column articles longer than a monitor window. While this works in print, it doesn't work online. I hate to page down, then back up and back down again.
Wide formatted text pages that don't let me resize the browser. I like narrow columns to read and when I can't squish them down without having to scroll right, I get greatly irritated.
News videos - give me text to read. Online video is usually too slow, too small and too hard to listen to.
Graphic intensive pages - graphics are good until they slow your page so much it takes forever to load. Rather than watching all those little icons get replaced with images, I'll move on.
Dark text on dark backgrounds - I need contrast. It may look cool, but if I can't read it, I'm moving on. This happens a lot when a photo is used for a page background.
Too many links - while I understand web pages are supposed to be interactive some pages have so many links on them you end up launching ads by just trying to bring the window to the front.
