15 WAYS TO ANNOY VISITORS ON YOUR BLOG

We put up with a lot of craziness on blog. However, you can push up too far, frustrate us, and send us away. This post is not about content. There’s a thousand ways to annoy visitors with content. No, this post is about design elements, the little things added to blogs and websites that make people bare their teeth and click away. One or two negatives and they might just roll their eyes and read on unless they are having a bad day in which case you’re out of luck.

The list includes my personal peeves, common Internet peeves, and the results of my survey from writer’s forum. Truthfully, there are hundreds of things you can do to irritate your visitors, but these are the top annoyances. To be clear, you should not do these things.

1. Have music or sounds playing as soon as the page loads. People visit at all times of day and night. Don’t wake the baby! Don’t alert the boss! Don’t make me listen to music I don’t like! Auto-loading music slows down page loading too – never a good thing.
2. Have things that move. Social media buttons and navigation menus that move around or continually scroll with me as I move down the page is a nuisance. Stop it! Animated gifs also make it difficult and distracting to read your content.
3. Show a pop-up window before I’ve read your content. Why would I subscribe to your newsletter if I don’t even know if I like your drivel? I’ve been to sites where that pop up window reoccurs on every single page. No, just no. If I visit your site regularly and I have joined your newsletter, chances are I’ll unsubscribe if you continually ask me to join using that evil pop-up.
4. Make every link on your site open in a new window/tab. This will send me away fast. I don’t want or need all those open tabs. If I like your content and want to read ten articles – ten new windows will make me cranky. Don’t make me work to enjoy your site!
5. Use a form that does nothing after I click the submit button. Filling out a form only to have it disappear is confusing. Did it go through? Should I send it again? Always have a “your message has been sent” message.
6. Hide navigation links. Do I need to explain why I don’t like searching for your book page, about your page, etc?
7. Use nonstandard HTML that only works in one browser. Then, tell me to switch browsers to view your site or to “best experience your site, view in blahblahblah browser.” Um, bite me.
8. Disable the right click or opposite click as I like to call it. People like to open links in a new page to view content. I realize this is contrary to #4, but I want all the control in this relationship. If your goal is to keep your images “safe”, it doesn’t work. There are ways around it.
9. Display a hover links bar at the bottom of your site. This is the bar that pops up and covers the text I’m trying to read (an example is wibiya). I shouldn’t have to click the close button to make it disappear either. Do you think I have all day to mess around on your site? Note: It’s not as annoying for me at the top, but some people don’t like it there either.
10. Install a third party comment system like Disqus. Ugh! It takes a long time for your page to load. Many times it fails to load too! And I don’t want to sign up for a comment system that shares with the world all my comments from everyplace I go – this refers directly to Disqus. It’s not good for you either as they limit the number of comments you can have on your post.
11. Use horizontal scrolling. This is bad design.
12. Use frames. Most people don’t understand how to use them correctly, so don’t do it.
13. Neglecting to reduce or resize images. When you don’t reduce the kilobytes it slows page loading. When you don’t resize the dimensions the image extends outside of the post boundary area. Not criminal, but sloppy.
14. Use bad text. This includes but is not limited to text over a busy background, small text, all caps, over stylized, low contrast colors (gray on white), black on white, hot pink on black (and other weird color combos), and link colors that are the same as your regular text color.
15. Clutter your sidebars. The more you put there, the less I look at them.

So, tell me, do you do things to annoy your visitor? Too bad! Out of the 15 annoyances listed what is your #1?

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