Annoying things on websites – how to turn people off

Annoying things on websites, how to turn people off and lose visitors

Here are a list of the things that I find really annoying on websites. Usually it will result in me leaving the website regardless of my initial intentions.

  • Music or Video that automatically starts playing
  • Pop Ups – this includes the ‘Slimbox’ that blocks out the content to tell you about a great new product available or event or something that I am really not interested in – the focus turns to finding the close button.
  • Flash that… takes… forever… to… load.
  • A photo of that girl who works at every company on the web (the stock photo everywhere girl!)
  • Photos of people shaking hands … in suits
  • Animated Clip Art, this may have been cool in…oh wait it was never cool.
  • Centered Bold Red and Blue Marketing catch-phrase text to …er….grab your attention?
  • Anything that flashes continuously
  • Beveled and Embossed buttons
  • More Advertising than actual content
  • Splash Pages – An animation that plays before you “enter” the website
  • Poor quality images, stretched or deformed.

2 thoughts on “Annoying things on websites – how to turn people off”

  1. Great list!

    Agree with all of that and have seen a few other highly irritating things:

    * Requiring people to sign up to read content – do you want me to engage with your site or not!?
    * Ads disguised as content
    * Badly thought out navigation
    * Or worse, navigation that’s hard to find
    * Pop ups where the little close x button is miles away from the ad – or worse, where there is an x-like device in the ad that you think is “close” but is actually part of the ad (I’ll accept this if it’s an ad for buried pirate treasure)
    * Low contrast – having white text on light backgrounds for example

    You know, it could be fun to try to make the most annoying website possible by combining all of the listed bad elements!

  2. We can certainly add those to the list, I forgot those misleading ads!

    On my list of things to do when I am procrastinating is to create a website that is incredibly bad! An example of ‘not what to do’

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