Website etiquette
I was thinking the other day, as I swore at yet another website, that there are a bunch of similarities between website design and etiquette.
In both cases, you’re trying to build relationships and communicate, and you want the process to go as smoothly as possible. And yet, so often, websites are just downright rude.
My most-hated website rudenesses (an incomplete selection from a very long list):
- Painfully long URLs which don’t paste neatly into email or chat
- Taking control of my browser (resizing, popping up windows, etc)
- Making me type the “www.” in front; can’t you make both work equally well?
- Black-hat SEO techniques
- Forcing me to use a particular browser
- Having Flash as the only means of navigation
- Not letting me opt out of your email newsletter
What are your most hated website design rudenesses?
9 Comments so far
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Skud,
As always your list neatly sums up my most hated “stupid web design ideas” but the one that really winds me up the most is expanding Flash banner ads that take up half the screen and obscure the actual content I’m trying to read. It’s worse that the offenders are so often the big corporate websites (think cnet, and the websites of large dead-tree newspapers) and even larger advertisers (Microsoft is one particularly guilty of this).
Then again, I do think that the Internet got stupider the day that Flash got popular anyway, and I’m well on my way to a life as a Grumpy Old Man.
Yours Irritably,
Chris
sites who specify font sizes.(especially in pixels)
sites who rely on pixel font sizes for the rest of the design to work.
Great list. I’m not sure if this is covered in your second bullet point or not but I get steam coming out of my ears whenever a website plays audio or video automatically when I go to the site. I do not EVER re-visit such sites.
Yes, all of the above. Probably my most hated is any time a website tries to force me to do something specific - whether it be listening to their inane music, using a particular browser, or “this site best viewed in AAAxBBB resolution”. When I’ve designed sites in the past, I’ve always kept my parents in mind - older, slow computers with font sizes dialed up a bit. The website should be at least minimally readable for everyone - whether it’s 800×600 on Mac IE 5 or 1600×1200 in Firefox.
Sites where you can’t link to anything except the main page - usually but not always the Flash navigation, but expiring session tags and whatnot also do this. If I want to send someone a link to a specific article, I don’t want to have to tell them how to search for it on the site.
Flashing banner ads esp down the side of a page, Hotmail does this ALL the time!
I know this is because our eyes are particularly sensitive to any movement in peripheral vision to watch out for predators sneaking up on us, but this is taking advantage of us and its fricking annoying!
I’m seriously considering curtains for my screen for reading email.
All of the above, but most especially noise, messing with my browser (or demanding that I do), and font problems.
Another problem with flash (beyond the basic rudeness) is that it slows down the browsing significantly — I can’t get to the navigation until their stupid little animation thingy finishes. Fie on that.
A specialization of font assumptions is wide graphics (like banners) that assume we’re all running at 1200×1600 or more (or, even if we are, that we’re willing to go full-screen). This used to annoy me a *lot*; now that I have the ImageZoom Firefox extension I can force a resize and go on. (The reason the big image is so bad is not just the image; it’s that the browser uses all that width for the surrounding text, leading to horizontal scrolling.)
Four words: Zeldman New Window Disease
I hate websites that has an autoplay music on the background! Even worse, those that doesn’t have any button to stop it!!!