What Do You Hate Most About Websites?
from the popups,-apparently dept
A new study looks at the biggest complaints from web surfers about certain sites and comes out with very few surprises at the top of the list: popup ads, sites that require registration and sites that require you to install some software before you can view them. In other words, intrusive and annoying stuff that gets in the way of the visitors viewing whatever content they came to view. This should be quite obvious, but apparently too many sites still haven’t figured it out. It’s also interesting to note, that many of these problems are being solved by third parties. Popup blockers are pretty standard and Bugmenot handles the registration issue on most sites. Still, the users who are impacted by these things say it makes them much less likely to ever return to the sites in question.
Comments on “What Do You Hate Most About Websites?”
Shockwave
Recently I’ve needed shockwave to view a few different webpages. No shockwave for firefox in linux. Bleh.
Bugmenot
I have noticed lately that more sites are deleting accounts that are listed in Bugmenot. Additionally, my employer put Bugmenot on the list of blocked internet sites, which renders it useless at work.
Re: Bugmenot
Your Employer is a dumbass. Do they make you wear your ATM Pin number on your Name Badge as well? Obviously they don’t care about their employee’s privacy.
Re: Bugmenot
Bugmenot Tip… use a web enabled cell phone to access it. Better yet, bookmark it for easy access. Your employer probably subscribes to some knee-jerk list subscription that blacklists anything even hinting of technical discussions too (those linux guys are hackers!).
Sites are always deleting accounts. More are always added. This has been true of it since day 1. Smart sites are learning that Bugmenot is helping them, not hurting them, by weeding out fake information registration sign ups. The NY Times recently even affirmed this in one of their own stories (link available to that story from bugmenot.com site).
Anyone notice...
Anyone notice this message at the top of the article?
>(After August 06, 2005, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)
Isn’t that complaint #2?
i hate flash!
flash is a pain in the hiney too
What do I hate most about websites
Companies with whom I’d like to do business that
– give me no contact details
– insist on me jumping through hoops just to find out about their products at all.
These guy never get my business.
(Plus all the registration & popup crap too, of course)
Re: What do I hate most about websites
Yes; corporate websites in general tend to be BS. “We do consultancy services for hundreds of different clients”. Um, yeah? That’s a fat lot of use. “We sell widgets to keep your beer cold”, now that at least I can understand.
The other real pain in the proverbial I saw was a website that popped-up a javascript dialog to tell me to view their site’s Ts&Cs of use. Erm, no, that can piss right off, too!
No Subject Given
Firefox with adblocker does a really good job blocking popups AND ads. The more ads I see, click…the LESS ads I see (and it supports wildcard filtering as well).
Now I just wish I could find a way to stop those floating ads….
Re: thecaptain.
yes those float over ads are easily my most hated. popups you can stop, registrations you can get around (or even register with if the website is worthy), but float overs just suck.
Re: No Subject Given
Use FlashBlock for that. Works great!
Annoyances
I’ve been seeing increasing use of Flash for menus. If your site does that, I won’t be back. It may not bother the 37% or so of the country that has a high-speed connection but it aggravates the heck out of those of us on dial-up. Heck, Flash anything really. The ‘net is supposed to be about communicating, well you ain’t communicating anything, you are just annoying me.
More Hate
I hate PDFs and Word documents on Websites.
But my biggest hate occurs because I browse in high-security mode with Javascript etc. turned off for everything except my trusted sites, as recommended by M$ etc. This means I never see popups or Flash, but I really hate sites with multiple, unrelated domains because it’s such a pain to get them working. I gave up Internet banking because of this issue.