Tuesday 6 June 2006

a dozen ways to piss off your readers

Just a quick summary from a page we just saw. (We see some of this in the 'sphere, so it seemed relevant here. Our own observations are the stuff in brackets.)

1) Pop-Ups
2) Pop-Under
3) Ban Right Clicks (and it's so damn easy to work around this one. we do it on principle some times.)
4) Music (almost top of our our personal most-hated list)
5) Fixed Screen Widths
6) Slow Loading Tables (: which includes stuff like hit counters and blogrolls. :)
7) Unnecessary Questions
8) Splash Pages (This pisses us off most. So many otherwise intelligent designers just love the darn things.)
9) Grabbing the Browser
10) The Obscure Plug-in
11) The IE only page
12) The Dark Page (which includes fluorescent text on dark backgrounds and bg pictures. Gah.)

Read the entire article. Do see the comments as well. Much fun.

p.s. If you have any pet peeves, and feel up to coming back here, please do add them in the comments. We promise to send on to many many designer friends.

p.p.s. Of course you're welcome to come say nasty things about our our design. We'd do the same for you. :)

3 comments:

Teleute said...

I have had an iLead pop-up thing on my blog for the last month or so. And I haven't the faintest idea how it got there. I haven't even inserted any new code or made any changes to my template recently. Help?

zigzackly said...

teleute,

Took a look at your blog, and the utilities you have plugged in are the webstats4u counter and the TTLB ecosystem code. I also did a dew random checks to see if there were other blogs that had the same problem, and I see that Samit gets a pop-up too, and he uses the same counter and TTLB script. Am guessing it's webstats4u that's popping the ad up. Suggest you disable that and check if the pop-ups go away.

-peter

Teleute said...

thankee muchly - you are most kind. i shall try that. :)