I really really hate when I encounter badly designed or badly built pages on the web, though I think I must understand, that the websites, in general, are more rubbish than usefulness; while hard, the fact that this will never change; someone will eventually come over and – if you had a good design/layout/frontend code in the first place – screw it all, or just most of it.
Some of the most common problems making everyday life harder than it should be:
- blogs galore; most of them have stock templates, stock templates plagued with problems: 10 or 11 px font size for content with banners everywhere (not just in a designated place, but in the posts, at the end of the posts, in a sidebar, under the menu etc) – even if the content is interesting, I am scared away by these usability issues.
- unreadable captchas: enough said. By the way I do hate the ReCaptcha service with its highly idealistic human ocr project; tie those whirly unreadable craps to a forum search function and I’ll hate you from my guts.
- registration for the simplest services; checkbox “send me advertising” already ticked (making marketing people dance with joy).
- messed up in-site searching: either it’s a stock solution, which is a crude crap (uncostumized MySQL fulltext) or just a Google search with the “site:” addendum; just add two words (be optimistic and try using quotes or logical operators) and see the irrelevant trash thrown at you.
- full flash, inaccessible sites with elevator music. When, when will you bastards learn that having a page where search is crippled, information is secondary and eyecandy is everything is not what most people need!? I can understand this for a graphical designer’s portfolio site, but for a webshop or a detailed company website this is just self gratification for the client, pain in the butt for the visitor.
- banneritis: popping up a messagebox saying that I must either turn off my adblocker (which I don’t use that often actually) or just that I gotta throw away Firefox and fall back to the holy blue letter E.
- broken or no rss at all where a news service is being used (job listing, blog posts, news, marketplace etc) – this clearly comes from stupidity and/or lazyness: programmers not “knowing” the rss/atom spec or just corporate greed, where the client is afraid of loosing some traffic (because he/she does not know that banners can be injected into feed) and in turn advertising revenue.
- supporting IE over any other browser. I’d take Lynx over IE anytime btw…
- boasting about an API, which is either undocumented or broken.
So, from now on I’ll try not to care anymore – I’ll try to understand for once and for all, that this is how things goes.