I’m visiting a lot of websites these days as I do research for articles I’m writing for one of my own sites, and there are several things that are really pissing me off:
- The huge number of pop-ups, banners, ads, etc. On many sites, they are simply everywhere – at the top, at the bottom, in the sidebar, after every paragraph of text or two.
- Articles spanning multiple pages that should be a single article (especially unnecessary slideshows). I understand why they do it from a website owner’s perspective, but from a user’s point of view, it’s a horrible experience.
- The terrible quality of so many sites – badly written articles, terrible formatting, tiny font sizes, bad colour choices making it difficult or impossible to read the text.
- Maybe it’s because my Internet speed is pretty bad, but pages with dynamic content (which is most of them nowadays), where you start reading and then stuff keeps moving around as new content is loaded or updated. When I started creating websites, back in the late 1990s, it was considered good practice to specify the sizes of everything (e.g. images), so that even if it took longer to download a large image, its place on the web page had already been allocated so the text didn’t jump around.
- The sheer size of “modern” pages, some of which can include literally dozens of external scripts – watch the status bar in your browser and you’ll see what I mean.
- Why would you display and auto-play a random video when somebody has visited your page to read the main article? It’s distracting, sometimes it’s difficult to work out how or where to turn it off, and it suggests to me that you think your article is bad or that the article was only clickbait to get you to their site.
- You’d be surprised how many sites that publish recipes do not include a photo of the finished dish. I really don’t think there’s any excuse for this these days. Actually, there are also pages that claim to be recipes, but when you get there, it’s just the names of a few dishes. To me, a recipe needs a minimum of two things – the ingredients (including quantities) and the instructions.
Please, I beg you, don’t do these things!
