Things I Hate When Clicking Through to a New Website

[miss_s_b]

• Autoplaying music or video. I tend to have lots of tabs open, and it's very annoying if you can't tell which tab the noise is coming from.


• Flashing/scrolling text, especially if it's an advert.


• Pop-ups, especially ones that are
  1. Advertising;
  2. Excessively needy - "sign up to my newsletter! Go on, PLEASE!", and/or
  3. Have the close button in an unusual place or an unusual colour
  Seriously, if you're GOING to have needy pop-ups, it should have a HUGE red "bugger off" in the top right hand corner...


• Articles spread across multiple pages. The New Yorker is a particular offendor in this regard.

This list is not exhaustive. I bet you lot can think lots of stuff to add to it, can't you? Any really good ones I shall edit in and credit you.

Comments

[http://www.nickbarlow.com/blog/]

Agree on the pop-up 'sign up to this and that' ads, which are even more annoying on mobile, where I often find zooming in to find the X causes the whole ad to recentre itself and leave the X off-screen.

Even if it's not in a pop-up, the whole 'sign up for my newsletter, which I won't show you an online copy of for you to decide whether you want it or not, but it's really good, promise!' annoys me no end.

[miss_s_b]

Oh God yes. ESPECIALLY when they want you to pay for it.

[andrewhickey.info]

Whenever I share a multi-page article, I always share the version found at the 'print' link (which sites like the New Yorker almost always have). That not only puts everything on one page, but it also cuts out most of the other problems from those articles.

[pseudomonas]

I find being asked to complete a survey about use of the website particularly special when I've not been able to see the website yet cos of a stupid pop-up asking me to do a survey.

[miss_s_b]

Oh Christ yes that's really irritating

[pseudomonas]

Oh, and stupid cookie policy notices.

[sallycandance]

Yes. This. And what I find truly weird is when you click on the X to close the tab and the page asks you to CONFIRM you really want to leave. It's like a little pop-up saying, 'We're watching you, we know you normally spend more time on a simgle webpage, so why would you leave early, why don't you STAY?'

[drunkwriter]

Having to sign in with Facebook, and then having to spend ages working out how to stop the site from spamming my Facebook feed. Yes, Goodreads, I love you, but unfortunately I am very much looking right at you on this score.

[miss_s_b]

Having to sign in with Facebook at all is a problem for me; I am a facebook-free zone :)

[gwenhwyfaer]

Ditto. I sometimes wonder if everyone who signs up to facebook thinks they are the very last person to do so. (And pray that it's not very long now before one of them is correct...)

[antisoppist]

I was recently looking up the name of an EU project referred to mostly by its abbreviation and the only place the website showed it in full was one letter at a time as if being typed on a typewriter, with sound effects.

I'm a translator so am frequently looking at foreign sites to find official names in English or to compare terminology. So I hate:
Arty designery pages that take forever to slowly do their creative thing before you get to the actual information.
Change language buttons that you have to hunt for.
Change language buttons that automatically go to Google Translate without telling me first.
Not a problem for me, but other languages only being provided under a link that says "other languages" in Swedish can't be that helpful for foreign visitors.

[miss_s_b]

Pages for businesses which make it really difficult to find contact details/address/opening hours. That's another one which really annoys me. I don't want to see a load of flash-based photo bollocks, I want to know if the shop is shut!

[pseudomonas]

ObXkcd - https://xkcd.com/773/

[miss_s_b]

Oh God yes.

[http://www.nickbarlow.com/blog/]

ObOatmeal: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website

[gwenhwyfaer]

I find this browser very useful indeed (and occasionally, for similar reasons, this one, or Opera Mini on a phone) as a litmus test. If it won't render a page in a way I can at least make sense of, then it's likely there's nothing on that page that will interest me. (Console-mode browsers are just a bit too spartan for me, though. Even with a separate image viewer, trying to look at lolcats is a bit pointless in text mode.)

[miss_s_b]

I used to have Opera Mini on the Nokia and liked it's speed and responsiveness. Currently loving Firefox for Android on the new phone.