5 New Things We All Hate about Web Sites

Last Updated on December 3, 2010

If your web site does any of these things, please stop. As innovation pushes the web forward, new annoyances frequently appear. You are embarrassing us and your visitors hate you for doing any of these things.

1. In-text Advertising – Sliding your mouse across a link causes advertising boxes to pop out. Reading sites with this type of advertising is like walking across a mine field. You read, you read, and then all of the sudden your concentration is destroyed by a random ad jumping out at you. This type of advertising needs to die, die, die.

2. Toolbar Footers – Visitor information, Twitter, Google search, chat — all in a facebook-like footer. Seems like a great idea, right? Holy cow, it’s annoying. This type of footer became popular after facebook launched their multifunctional footer at the bottom of their site. Services such as Wibiya has made it possible for other sites to use the toolbar easily. I don’t know why we hate it, but we really do.

Related to this are the evil headers that appear on sites like the About.com and the New York Times.

3. Pagination – How can a site double or triple their number of ad impressions? Just spread the article across a multitude of pages! We use ads to pay the bills around here, but the degree of pagination on many web sites is getting ridiculous.

4. Video ad longer than the actual video – News and video sites are now running video ads before you can watch the video you selected. I understand that; we all need to make a dollar. However, please don’t make me watch an ad that’s longer than the actual video I wanted to see!

5. Paywalls – More and more sites place their content behind a subscription requirement. Although frequently google cache will still get you access to the information, the paywall practice is dishonest and against the idea behind the web. The fact that google allows a site to present information in one format to the user and in another format to the search engines compounds this problem.

I love the fail of this picture.

Please feel free to post some of your annoyances about the web in the comments below.