Perhaps it was just my lucky night (or my mood), but while surfing around this past hour for various things I stumbled across a number of "web site features" and/or "website operations" that I found annoying, irritation and downright stupid. Since I've noticed a number of other "such annoyances" on other websites over time, I thought I'd list them here so that perhaps someday the webmasters of these sites might find the list and correct the problems.

Feel free to expand on this list, too.

1. Website Speed - As Brett said in his long-ago ancient post, speed is everything. And you know what...it STILL IS. There is absolutely no excuse in this day and age for a website to take 5+ seconds to load over a high-speed DSL connection. There isn't a day that goes by when I bail on at least 5 or more websites due to slow loading.

2. Malformed Scripts (especially Javascript) - Yes, the world of browsers makes scripting difficult. But as a user, I don't especially care about the difficulties encountered by the webmaster in the creation of a script. As a user, what I want is for the page to load quickly - and PROPERLY. I constantly stumble across sites that have malformed scripts on them, leading either to the page crashing entirely, annoying messages provided by my browser (Firefox) as the page loads, and...most evil of all, perhaps...endless refreshes (yahoo mail use to be a great one for that with Firefox).

3. Incomplete Web Page Loading - The culprit in most of these cases is advertising, where websites use javascript code that is served by the advertiser. Although the publisher can't prevent an advertisers server from "having issues" or simply being overloaded, the publisher CAN prevent the page that code is on from "freezing." I've come across way too many web pages where the advertisers server isn't working properly and that problem causes the publishers web page (or sometimes entire site) to crash. A snippet of code loads and then nothing more.

4. Dancing Web Pages - This is a relatively new problem, but one I'm seeing more and more. On many websites that have forgotten the rule of "speed is everything," when I visit the web page and begin to read whatever is there, it's especially annoying to have the layout of the web page continually change. One second the main text area is 500 pixels wide, the next it's 300 pixels wide, the next an image pops up where I was just reading, etc...

Web pages that "dance" are a wonderful way to turn back your visitors.

5. Where's the Price? - Thankfully, this problem isn't seen that much anymore. But I still come across many websites that haven't quite figured out yet that people (such as myself) will NOT "register" first or add a product to the shopping cart just to see a products price. You want my money? Fine. But you better make it easy for me. Requiring registering or "extra steps" by forcing me to add an item to the shopping cart is stupid.

6. Contextual Text Ads - As a Webmaster myself, I do sympathize with the desire for a website to make money. However, there is such a thing as "too much" when it comes to advertising. One of the largest annoyances for me are the contextual text ads. There is nothing wrong - in theory - with these. But, some sites have these things two or three times in EACH paragraph. The result is that virtually any simple mouse movement over the page (like, to click on something - perhaps even an ad), triggers the contextual link advertisement - thus spawning the ad which won't close on it's own. The result is that I'm finding myself staying further and further away from websites that use these types of ads too much, as they make my use of the website difficult, irritating and annoying.

Well...I feel better. :)