I can’t agree with what you’ve written…but far outnumbering this are site which assume everywhere has an American address. Having to figure out how to compress my address from four lines to fit into ‘street’ and ‘city’ fields is one thing. I’m just glad I don’t have the problem some relative do, which is trying to figure out what to put into an obligatory ‘zip code’ field when they don’t have a postal code of any kind.
There are way more than two that are a pain in the ass. I’ll list two not already given.
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Articles online that give a town only or nothing identifying their location, and no dates on them. The date of the article is very important, since some of them are many years old. I can search ofr towns also, but you still have to guess which state it’s in sometimes.
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Too many sites are linking large data files and making them all autoload. This is valid for company sites and message boards. Until recently I had to wait 20 minutes every time I wanted to check a game piece online, because the large company web files had to be downloaded before you could enter your codes. After entering the code a flash animation had to download for 10 minutes so I could watch an animated sorry you lose or win flash. You can’t go to a site and look up their local phone number in less than 15 minutes many times. Companies had beter learn that a large percentage of people don’t have broad band.
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Companies have started to not give contest rules printed out, and require internet access from people wanting to play. This could be a trend that is going to conflict with some states contest laws.
I agree with most of the annoyances in this thread. In fact, I have NoScript and AdBLock installed in Firefox, with fairly draconian defaults enabled. I use AdBlock to block annoying css and background images, as well as ads. I don’t want distracting animation, or sound, or other annoying crap in pages I read.
But I don’t get the venom here:
:rolleyes:
Have you ever written a custom crawler and search engine for a website? More than one website? How about an engine that combines your blog, your image gallery, your forums, and your contact us page? What if part of your website is implemented in PHP and another part written in ASP.NET? Google’s crawler, query parser and search engine is a bit more sophisticated than what I can cobble up on my own within reasonable time, it’s free, it doesn’t care how the website is implemented, and it’s easy to integrate into any website.
I mean, sure, a websurfer could fire up google.com and do the query himself, if he has the know-how. But most people don’t know how to use the advanced search options in Google without loading up the advanced search page. I think that, even for a dumb Google search of your website, most people would appreciate a query textbox on your sidebar rather than nothing at all.
Besides, everyone knows that the two most annoying things a website can do is (1) use flashing text and (2) have broken links.
I think the most annoying thing to me is still mystery meat. I really get exasperated quickly when I have to play Myst just to get some information.
AMEN! It should be law, punishable by liver-punch, to have dates on your webpage. One thing I can’t stand is to get excited to find out one of my favorite bands is going to be in town THIS SATURDAY only to eventually learn through the power of deduction that they mean Saturday, January 13th, 1998.
How about web pages that refer to other pages, but do not provide a link, the site’s designers apparently having not quite grasped the “hyper” part of HyperText Markup Language.
You might be thinking “actually, Usram, I rarely encounter that particular annoyance”, but then you probably don’t hang out at the support website of the third biggest software company in the world, who you would think would be able to grasp the concept of a fucking URL link. But no - they have literally hundreds of thousands of technical documents on line, most of them having references to several others, so that a typical query generates a large branching chain of associated documents. And here’s the thing - these pages refer to each other by number, not by link. For every single reference, you have to copy the number of the document referred to, go back to the query page, and search for that document. It’s like hypertext was never invented.
Their website also violates most of the rules already mentioned above, by the way. It is, by some distance, the worst website I have ever used.
That website really does suck and is very misleading.
January 13, 1998 was a tuesday.
Perhaps we should provide examples of the most heinous violators and write them emails telling them why they aren’t getting as much traffic as they’d like. How cool would it be if we could actually get one of these sites to see the light and change their layout?
Good idea, but probably these idiots don’t even provide an email address. Even a relatively decent site like Amazon makes you jump through hoops to find out how to email them.
That’s another irksome problem. Many sites that offer email support only reply by telling you to call them. Duh!
Opening a page should not produce streaming video AND audio. Imagine you’re up until the wee hours listening to a CD while perusing por…a message board, and forget to turn the volume down.
A few hours later you wake up, bleary eyed and just want the latest sports news and scores. You walk down a quiet hall in a quiet house to a quiet room and fire up the monitor. You click a bookmark and are suddenly listening to either an ad or a snippet of last night’s broadcast. Not loud, but still surprising.
I’m looking right at you ESP fucking N. Another bone of contention with them is the fact that it seems at least half of their content is restricted to paid subscribers to “Insider”. Fuck 'em. Make one site for us average Joe’s, and a seperate link for those that pay. I’ve deleted them from the bookmarks. Fox Sports is my go-to site for sports.
And speaking of Fox, I’ve bitched about this before, it’s just as fucking annoying to watch FX and have the pop-ups for programming with the louder-than-the-program-being-shown sound effects.
And turn signals! Can people start using their turn sign…sorry. Got off to a rant there. Apologies. 
I think you recognize the problem with this. The admen are doing this shit. Those in charge of the companies themselves are clueless and look at the numbers the admen are showing them compared to how many complaints they get.
It would certainly look like a fair trade-off on paper.
THANK YOU! I absolutely LOATHE the “no right click” code. I’m always using right click to open new tabs and links, and often to bookmark and what have you.
Not to mention-sometimes I like to save images to my hard drive JUST TO LOOK AT. NOT to steal for my own website. Is that so horrid?
All this is probably some meddlesome paranoid’s idea of Extra Security. They must figure that if they can keep even some* legit* customers out, their site is really tight.
This has to be the nerdiest thing I’ve seen on the Dope yet this year. I salute you, sir!
Agreed. I always think that those sites were designed my amateurs. Pros know how easy it would be to steal the image. Quite often it will piss me off enough that I won’t buy from the site or person (I seem to see it most often on eBay or sites selling something, but that may be because I don’t right click on other sites too much.)
One little thing that drives me buggy:
You come to a form that you need to fill in that has several fields, and at the top of the form is the statement “* indicates required field” (or something similar).
And each and every field is marked with a *.
Sheesh. If every field has to be filled in, just say so at the start!
Bingo.
Quick, how many toothpicks did I drop?
I second everyone who mentioned the Flash intros, sound, etc. I’m still stuck in the computing dark ages with a dial-up connection at home. (DSL’s not available where I’m at and the cable and satelite options that I can get are way outside of my budget. I do have a high speed connection at work if I need it.)
I mainly use my home computer for shopping, paying bills and spending insane amounts of time on a certain message board, stuff that shouldn’t require high-speed access. Nothing makes me any madder than when I’m trying to do something that should be really simple like paying a bill and I have to wait around for all the fancy gimmicks to load up. I’m not saying there’s not a place for it on sites obviously targeted to those with higher tech interests who are likely using a high-speed connection, but I really wish page designers would try to keep in mind that there are still some of us who don’t have the hardware for all of their fancy-schmancy tricks to be anything but annoying.
I’d didn’t see it mentioned earlier but here’s a site that’s extensively featured examples of bad website design and what by contrast works.
This is more of a problem with non-commercial sites, but there are still plenty of them (often constructed by persons obsessed with alternative health cures, chemtrails and other esoterica) with a single looooooooong page that takes forever to scroll through, if for some reason you ever wanted to.
Flashing script, cleverly moving objects and drooling smileys tend to drive me away, as does the slow-loading completely pointless intro page.