About Me

My Internet Pet Peeves

What people do on their websites which ticks me off

After visiting many websites in my free time, when I am being a very "random surfer" I have come across many sites which have annoyed the hell out of me. This is simply because the people who have been designing them have not bothered to think about what is good for the various people who will be viewing their site. I have spent many hours trying to come up with the best possible design for you the viewer, so that visiting my site is a pleasurable and easy experience. Therefore I have decided to include a list of what not to do for anyone who is starting out with building websites or just simple wants to improve there website, from my opinion. You may disagree with me and that is fine and any comments on the below are welcomed within my guestbook.

In order of annoyance:

1. Thumbnails/images which are the original large image, but with just the width and height changed in the image tag

This is my biggest pet peeve. The sin of all sins in web design. Not only do you have a poor webpage which takes absolutely ages to load, but you also use up loads of your web server space by not having optimal sized files. All you have to do is to resize your image so that it is the size you specify in your image tag. Simple.

Also use compression so that your image size is not enormous for detail that the naked eye cannot tell the difference between! I know it sounds like a lot to dobut if you are struggling for room on your server it is a god send. I worked out that with compression I could save 3 times as many images on the server! That was only with compressionwho knows how much more space I have saved by resizing all the images.

Also being nice to your visitors by making it so that they do not have to spend all day downloading your pages means that they are likely to stay longer and possibly even return to your site in the future. I have lost count of the amount of webpages I have given up on viewing after it has taken ages for just the 1st page to try and load. No matter how great your content is.if it takes all year to load, the viewer is unlikely to say around to read it.

2. Disabling Right Click

Ok many of you will be wondering why this is a pet peeve of mine, since it has been put on peoples sites as a way of stopping people saving images off the site since they are copyrighted. The problem I have is in disabling right click they also disable the ability for you to "open a link in a new window" which is the main way that I surf the internet. I surf like this as it enables me to keep the original website open, yet view the links that the original website points to as well. Disabling right click means that I have to follow every link, and thus if a link is off your site, then I will go off your site and will probably never return to it.

Also the idea that disabling right click means that people cannot save your images is out of date now, since Internet Explorer 6 now allows you to save images without having to right click on them.

3. Pop up adverts when they are in excess

Yes I know, I know. If you are using a free web server you are bound to get adverts, and even I have adverts on my site. It is not that I have a problem with adverts, it is just when the adverts are about 3 pop up windows on each page you view. This is simply a choice of finding a free web server provider who uses well placed adverts instead of death by pop ups. I have moved my site off at least 3 free web servers once they decided that they would use excessive amounts of pop up windows. Lycos tripod was the worse of those 3. Not only did it give you pops ups every page a visitor used, but it also place one frame down the right and then another frame over your page. No matter how much free space that Lycos Tripod offers over Yahoo Geocities, it is not worth it for such a death by advert site!

4. Background music and the inability to turn it off

Ok this is not a big pet peeve, like the above, but it still annoys me. The problem I have with it is that as a visitor you are waiting for the music to download sometimes before you can fully view the page, which means that if the clip is large you have to wait ages. Also if you are in a computer lab where the speakers are on the monitor and cannot be turned off, then the whole computer lab knows you are visiting that web page. (Not amusing when this happened to me!) . Biggest annoyance of all is if you cannot stick the music. I have been on some sites which have rubbishy midi files playing in the background and instead of reading the page, all you do is scream at your computer "SHUT UP!".

If you are not listening to any music on your computer during the time you are visiting the site, then you can simply turn your speakers off. If you are like me who always listens to music through Windows Media Player while surfing the net, you cannot do this. Therefore for anyone who does place background music on their site with the inability for the user to turn it offdon't expect me to be staying long visiting your site if I ever find it!

5. JavaScript that does not work

This is a simply fixed by TESTING your pages which have JavaScript on before you upload them. Not to difficult. I mean I would rather visit a website with no JavaScript on, than one which has JavaScript that does not work any day.

I know some of the things above, I in the past have been guilty ofbut that was simply down to inexperience of what makes a good website, and of which I now avoid like the plague in any of the website which I build.

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