Top Ten List Of Website Annoyances

[Darren]

There is a new article from Robert Potter on HostReview titled “My Top Ten List of Website Annoyances! (http://www.hostreview.com/guides/Marketing/articles/MyTop.html)" Robert’s list includes several of my “favorite” annoyances, but there are still plenty of other common mistakes that influence my opinion of a website. A post from a community news sites complaining about the lack of news is near the top of my list. If you can’t find anything to write about, why should I bother going to your website again?

What about you? What’s in your Top 10 list?

[ampalian]

Flashing graphics
Poor load times
Pop ups
Pop unders
Shoddy images
Music
Snowflakes

[Darren]

Snowflakes in general, or do you mean flakes that cascade down the page while you are looking it?

Flashing graphics
Poor load times
Pop ups
Pop unders
Shoddy images
Music
Snowflakes

[larissayoung]

Bits and pieces copy/pasted from another forum...


Web Design in 2005
http://fortymedia.com/2005-web-design-forecast.fhtml

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Huh. That's something nifty to look at:

* Freshness: New ideas, new colors, new layouts, and new approaches
* Effort: Minimalism is out; detail is in.
* Professionalism: Site users have little patience for amateur design.
That part though is sort of repetitive, eh? Excluding the minimalism part - it always seems like that comes and goes with the season.


* Out: Retro; Swiss/Euro; Minimal; “that standards-compliant look”
* In: Wicked Worn (close to being overdone, but we’ll still see quite a bit of it); Turn of the Century; any look that’s not yet done to death

Oof. Retro has been out for quite awhile, unless you're looking to shop at Old Navy.


Colors
* Color of the year: Brown
* Tech grays and blues take a sabbatical; may not be back soon.
* Pure red (the “new blue” of the past few years) falls into disfavor.
* Designers are feeling confident—lots of bold colors this year.
* Lots of “in-between” colors (yellow-greens, red-oranges, etc.) used to achieve fresh looks
* Web-safe palette is at last widely understood to be obsolete; Web-smart palette takes over.

HAH! What can brown do for you. But I have definitely taking a liking to brigher colors. (i.e. http://www.nibuha.com/)


* Designers realize that Verdana is ugly; most stop using it.
* The novelty of Georgia as a body text type wears off; still used for headings.
* Arial dominates as the body text typeface for the year; despite much disdain for this overused font, it provides some needed relief from the overuse of Verdana.
* Heading text increasingly done in serif typefaces, especially with sIFR.

Arial is definitely a big thing. Verdana however will still be my love.


* Table-using designers increasingly seen as belonging to a lower caste.
* Table-free design becomes the norm for redesigned corporate websites.
* sIFR reintroduces typography to sites with dynamic content.
* Flash widgets come into common use; full-site Flash still regarded as “sucks.”

...I knew I should have stuck to using layers instead of tables. *g*


* Still no clear choice for general website content management.
* Movable Type continues to lose mindshare for content management, despite great functionality.
* The chronological aspect of blogs is downplayed; new ways to search content become popular.

MT is not a bad thing, and I am amused at the "still no clear choice" ... heh. Just manage your content and hush up about the process already.

New ways to search content, I cannot agree more. Things are getting interesting in that market for sure.

Thanks for the info/post/update! Definitely will pass it on to our design team to take a look at.

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Re: Web Design in 2005
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Some things that I wish would go out of style:

+ using images to display text when you aren't doing anything with that text that mandates the need for an image.
+ using jpegs and suffering either lossiness or large image sizes rather than realizing "hey! my image has a lot less than 256 colors!"
+ using non-standard plugins, html or javascript and then blaming the user when the site doesn't work for them.
+ flash splash (it's dying though isn't it?)
+ "clever" navigation instead of "intuitive" navigation.
+ thinking that your website is a magazine and should be designed accordingly.
+ making a website that is roughly 20 pages with approx. 1 sentence of real content on each page.
+ making a website that is one page with about 8000 sentences of content.
+ ignoring superior standards that have been out for five years and instead favoring "what i learned at skool!"

etc. etc.


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Re: Web Design in 2005
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As far as the graphics and layouts go... I hate to say this is in or this is out. Dope photography is extremely high on the list. I think a site should lead the user as oposed to the user just clicking all over the place. Flash Splashes should DIE. so should blue.
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