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web design practices that suck

These are just a few pet peeves I have regarding websites I’ve noticed in the past week or three. This is just dealing with a few usability and other issues, not some of the really harsh stuff such as fraudulent business practices I could rip.

Illegible text

What is the point of having a website if it is hard to read your content?Previously having written about text legibility on the internet, this is an important topic to me.Cramming a website with information is easy. Using very small fonts allows you to do this, but it cripples the experience for your readers, especially people with vision problems or on laptops with higher resolution screens.Designing with standard (1.0 em) font sizes in mind is much harder. You can’t cram in as much text. You actually have to think: “what is the information that is actually important to my customers?” and design accordingly.Information Architects Japan lists 5 simple tips that make up what they call The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard.

Registration to access basic functions

This type of thing is found at sites like IMDB to access comments, or on all types of newspaper sites that still don’t get it.This is annoying in many circumstances. If this wasn’t in place, I’d gladly check out a site’s content and then register if I like it. But if you force me to do it right off of the bat, it just ticks me off and makes it more likely that I’d never give you my email address.When you do this, people just rely on services like BugMeNot to get around it and you lose a valuable opportunity to coax somebody into giving you a name and email address.

Social bookmarking madness

Madness? This is Spartaaaaaa! (sorry).

There are only about 5 of these sites that are really worth a damn. You don’t need to include a button to add your content to every crappy copycat under the sun. Sure, select a few of the more common ones, maybe Digg and Reddit and Delicious and possibly Facebook and maybe one more, but anything beyond that becomes stupidly ridiculous.

The Sociable Plugin on Wordpress for example allows one to select from what seems like of sites. It isn’t the fault of the plugin though, just people who go way overboard with trying to promote their sites.

Excessive Ads

You gotta feed your family so you put a few ads on your site. I respect that.You spend time creating high quality content so you want to get a couple beers out of that or maybe even a fancy dinner or three. Thats beautiful.But drowning your site in ads sucks. It cheapens the experience. It makes it easy to ignore the whole block of ads you put in place. You kill the goose that lays the golden egg when you put too many ads in and force users to install ad blockers or turn on popup blocking.Until micropayments emerge or some other economic model dominates the internet, ads are here to stay. But try not to make them too annoying.I think that the way Matt Brett arranges his ads is nearly perfect.. The ads are simple Text Link Ads, so its not visually distracting at all, as some ads tend to be. This is a service I plan on checking out for my own site in the future.

In-text advertising.

In the same vein, in-text advertising sucks too. It is great for generating a few accidental clicks, but make the overall site experience suffer. Maybe somebody will come up with a way to make this better, but for right now, using any type of plugin that exerts control over your content links isn’t a very good idea.

Putting entire blog story on main page

When I discover a new blog, I want to skim through the content and figure out if the site is for me. Putting the entire story on the main page makes it harder to do so and is annoying. Designers Mind is one otherwise great site that does this.There’s nothing wrong with forcing users to scroll a bit, but you shouldn’t force them to hunt for a long time to check out your content. Good summarizing skills are important. Use an excerpt. Post folding is cool.

Making you click 100 next buttons to get through lists

Lists are very popular items. Forcing users to click 40 times to advance through a top 40 movies list might prop up your site statistics a little bit, but it creates a horrible user experience and somebody will be less likely to return because it makes reading your content a drag.Think long-term. Create something valuable and easy to use and people will eventually come.An extension of this is comment systems where you have to click on each individual comment to read it. This trend seems to be dying, but even big sites like Digg seem to be trying to get too cute with this.

Shitty ads

Is this because sports fans are viewed as extraordinarily time-rich by organizations and they’re just trying to capilalize on that by trying to get them to click on a bunch of junk to find what they need, or is it just general ineptness at work?

I’m mentioning sports websites here because they’re some of the biggest offenders.Are there some league-wide rules in the NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL that force sites to be organized a certain way? Many large organizations suffer from crappy websites, trying to stuff every single division on each screen, but this is especially common in the sports world.The Philadelphia Sixers website is a prime example of this problem. As with many large organizations, there is no concept of organizing the information and axing what isn’t useful. Instead, they try and get links to virtually every single company department on the main screen. A few of the bits of information that are useful seem to be placed in horrible locations, are too small to be legible, and seem intentionally designed to look like ads when they could be used as content.

Andre Iguodala is too sexy to be placed on such a crappy ad.

And not only that, but the ads are very cheap and ugly looking.

Snap shots popup plugin

I’m seeing this crappy plugin more and more frequently, and I really dislike it. It is a usability nightmare to have unexpected things fly up and cover what you’re trying to read. Motion on the internet implies advertisement, not something useful, and shouldn’t be used unless absolutely necessary.Leave me alone when browsing, please.

Default Themes

Not everybody has web designing skills, and not everybody has the money to afford their own hosting or custom theme right away, so I don’t begrudge that. What I do dislike are established bloggers that use some free template. Do your part to make the interwebs beautiful and pretty and easy to use.

Plugins that replicate OS features

There are blog calendar plugins, date plugins, etc that replicate standard operating system features.Umm…the user is already at a computer. They would rarely need something like this. It just clutters up the site and makes it harder to use and layout nicely.

Shitty URLS

This is kind of a pet peeve of mine, but I hate URLs that contain a bunch of characters like this….sfasdas?dk?54658/ref=s9_asdsf?$…

Big sites like Amazon make it hard to make pretty urls because of the sheer number of stuff they have to track and the mountains of older code they probably have to maintain. Small sites are hard because many small companies don’t have the money to pay for custom development or to at least buy decent software, so they buy crappy PHP scripts that kinda/sorta work but suck in an effort to save a few bucks in the short term

This makes it harder for users to navigate your site and that sucks. It also probably slightly worsens your search engine rankings and that also sucks.Incidentally, the idea of pretty URLs is one of the reasons I love Ruby on Rails. Modifying the routes.rb file allows you to fairly easily alter the typical controller/action/id URL convention that Rails follows, and it feels a lot easier than mod_rewrite.This………/cars/view/45……….is a whole lot more intuitive than this……..sfasdas?dk?54658/ref=s9_asdsf?$…There are plenty of other cool Rails tricks with URLs that I’ll cover in the future at some point.

Conclusion

Those are just a few of my pet peeves on the internet…

Posted on August 27th, 2007 by Chris Papadopoulos.

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Comments

1. Jeroen @ Sep 29

   Wait a minute,

   an entire article devoted to legibility on the net, and then you come up with dark-bleu text on a black background for your hovered links? Not very legible indeed, or did I miss the tag…?

   BTW: Nice site, good articles!

   PS Why is email required when your form doesnt tell so?

2. Chris Papadopoulos @ Sep 29

   Jeroen,

   Thank you for the comment. I appreciate all perspectives as I am not perfect and can definitely make mistakes. What matters to me though is continued improvement and all criticism and comments, whether good or bad, helps.

   I personally like the black and blue links, but I’ll reconsider whether or not this is the optimum solution based on your comment.

   I acknowledge that my site isn’t in perfect condition right now, and there are a few things with regards to comments and other issues I realize I need to fix.

   Unfortunately (or actually fortunately) I’m busy with projects nowadays so its hard to find the energy to sit down and change a few things.

   But thanks for the comment.

3. klingon(new comment) @ May 26

   I think you should add transparent png’s to the list because there are still people who use IE 6.

4. Mac Tips(new comment) @ May 26

   Cool article. Gave me a couple of ideas for my site.

5. Chris Papadopoulos(new comment) @ May 26

   Thanks for the comments.

   As far as transparent PNGs go, yeah I know. But as time goes on, I’m caring less and less about perfectly supporting IE6.

   Question that needs to be asked. Are people who are still using ancient browsers or old operating systems like Windows 98 very likely to be great customers for any type of business?

6. Ryan(new comment) @ May 28

   You have lots of “pet peeves on the internet”

   All good points though

7. Ryan(new comment) @ May 28

   I also agree about the dark blue text on the black buttons, it’s hard to read. Couldn’t you change it to a lighter blue? That wont take any time.

   Also about transparent PNG’s, there’s nothing wrong with using them responsibly. Technology has to move on.

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