Web Design Pet Peeves

As Internet technology advances at a forever-accelerating pace, it becomes
increasingly simple to make a complete disaster area of your Web site. The
consequences of bad design can range from a mild case of ugliness to a
serious case of irritating the crap out of people. Here is a quick look at
the most annoying ways to torture your visitors.

1) Pop On Close
This is a purely evil script that opens another window whenever you leave a
site or close the window it's in. Every surfer has stumbled onto this at one
time or another, although it is by far most common on porn sites. For the
more agile clickers it becomes a race to see whether they can close windows
faster than they pop, for the less experienced often leads to a reboot out
of pure frustration.

2) Window Resize
The only thing worse than having a site tell me I should be using a certain
browser in a certain resolution is a site that automatically resizes my
browser window to suit its needs. Typically that means expanding it to full
screen and removing the toolbars in such a way that it becomes very
difficult to close.

3) No Going Back
Back buttons are there for a reason. Disabling it might seem like a clever
way to get users to spend more time on your site, but the usual result is
another person determined never to return once they do find their way out.

4) Sound Bombardment
As expected, this problem has been growing steadily ever since Microsoft
introduced the "bgsound" tag. If you simply must have sound, at least be
courteous enough to give the user some control over it, and don't just let
loop endlessly in the background whenever the page is loaded.

5) Unfriendly Frames
Although they are not quite as annoying as they used to be, frames still
tend to interfere with navigation and produce strange results when people
don't enter a site through the front door. Fortunately there is little you
can do with a frame that you can't do just as well without one, so frames
are becoming less popular on the Web.

6) Excessive Animation
It is perfectly acceptable to have a few images on your page that are not
animated, if only because the majority of surfers still use dial-up. Sure
the standard Windows cursor isn't nearly as much fun as having your name
chasing mouse movements across the screen, but if doesn't necessarily follow
that absolutely everything on your site should be bouncing around in some
way.

7) Mystery Maze Navigation
A person should not need a PhD in iconology to navigate your site. While it
may seem obvious to you that a little picture of the Starship Enterprise
means "archives," this might not be crystal clear to your visitors. Try to
put some basic navigation on ALL your pages, and if you decide to use some
nifty Java or DHTML in your menus, make sure they actually work (and not
just in IE).

8) Title Tag Abuse
This peeve is beginning to reach epidemic proportions, mostly due to
people's efforts to get their pages to rank higher in search engine results.
Instead of something short and sensible that will fit nicely into a
bookmark, title tags are increasingly filled with spam, bear no relation to
the content on the page, begin with "Welcome to," or are absent altogether.

9) Poor Readability
A number of things can contribute to making a site unreadable, including
color choices, grammar, and font sizes. There are many good things about
Cascading Style Sheets, but more often I see them used to fix the point size
of fonts on a page. A bad idea, since point sizes vary dramatically from one
platform to the next. What looks terrific in Windows may appear ridiculously
miniscule on a Mac.