// 101 Heinous Website Sins To Really Freakin’ Annoy Your Visitors
// Mar 17th, 2008 & filed under Design[Please digg this. It would be much appreciated]
Every so often we all like a good rant. What better way to get it off your chest, than write a big social media lovin’ list post?
Here are 101 ways in which, to a lesser or greater degree, you may effectively drive people away from your site. Not all of them will be applicable to everyone, but some of them will be applicable to many, and of course, there are exceptions.
Design
1. Pack your site full of Adsense within the content.
2. Use flashing .gif’s.
3. Use a design that everyone else is using.
4. Don’t change the header, or any visual aspects of the free theme you’re using.
5. Use fonts which are too small.
6. Use fonts which are too big.
7. Use text which lacks contrast for the main content.
8. Set your line height so that it makes reading a chore.
9. Have a huge header, especially of yourself.
10. Make your main content area too wide, so it’s difficult to read.
11. Don’t show any difference between normal text and hyperlinked text.
12. Leave no margin around your images.
13. Use Comic Sans.
14. Fill your sidebar with icons/images.
15. Fill your sidebar with a huge blogroll.
16. Make the page width over 1100px.
17. Ignore optimizing images for the Web.
18. Avoid aligning headers, sidebars, graphics or titles, etc.
19. Use too many colours.
20. Think shiny ‘web 2.0′ is cool, and the future of web design.
Usability
21. Don’t offer RSS feeds.
22. Don’t have a contact page.
23. Have “Site best viewed with…” somewhere in the page. Especially IE6.
24. Have too many categories.
25. Use a free service for your blog, with a free domain e.g. example.blogspot.com.
26. Send out a newsletter everyday (that’s on top of your RSS feed).
27. Make your url and site name completely unrelated.
28. Use a visible site counter, especially when you get very few visitors.
29. Use a visible feed counter when you’ve under 50 subscribers.
30. Don’t use points or subheadings.
31. Use words that are completely obscure, and no one understands.
32. Get music to play automatically when people visit.
33. Use the Snap Shots plugin.
34. Make your site so heavy, dial-up users have to wait 30 seconds for you site to load.
35. Use unnecessary Flash.
36. Have a splash welcome page.
37. Don’t have a search box (doh!… I’ve forgotten to add one!).
38. Design a site usable in one browser only.
39. Place so much content on one page, that users can barely click on the scrolling bar.
40. Make links open in a new browser window.
Relationships
41. Show no respect towards highly respected bloggers/webmasters/designers.
42. Leave rude, negative comments on other people blogs.
43. Be a pseudo expert in your niche.
44. Don’t try to become an expert in your niche.
45. Never trackback to other blogs.
46. Email everyone (especially people you don’t really know), to tell them of your latest post.
47. Be deliberately controversial.
48. Recommend products that you’ve never tried yourself.
49. Never leave comments on other blogs.
50. Never reply to emails.
51. Never take advice.
52. Ignore visitor questions.
53. Never help another person - every man for himself.
54. Turn comments off.
55. Don’t reply to comments.
56. Treat people in a different manner than you would treat them face-to-face.
57. Allow commenters to attack other commenters.
58. Don’t admit when you’re in the wrong.
59. Write about, and slag people off by name.
60. Delete comments, just because they disagree with you.
Content
61. Copy other peoples work in full.
62. Write about your trip to the supermarket.
63. Rite lik dis, u no, lik a txt msg.
64. Use no punctuation at all which makes your writing hard to follow and people have no idea when to stop or breathe and the sentence loses any meaning because the reader is so annoyed with the writing that they don’t even know what you’re writing about.
65. Use there, their, they’re and your, you’re in the wrong places.
66. Don’t hyperlink when you’ve cited a reference.
67. Write reviews that are always negative, pointing out all the faults.
68. Use foul language - swear/curse/cuss.
69. Update twenty times a day.
70. Update extremely sporadically.
71. Offer nothing new.
72. Copy articles, and ‘tactfully‘ reword them in a way where they lose their effectiveness.
73. WRITE IN UPPERCASE.
74. Never proofread.
75. Write boringly, without passion.
76. Don’t write in your own voice, copy someone else.
77. Write about everything.
78. Always write really long (how long is a piece of string?) posts, and never break them into a series or parts.
79. Write only paid-per-post or paid reviews.
80. Change topics.
Miscellaneous
81. Use popups.
82. Require registration in order to leave comments.
83. Write for search engines.
84. Don’t have an ‘about’ page (guilty as charged!).
85. Use post titles that tell the reader nothing about the content.
86. Market yourself as the best when clearly, you’re not!
87. Offer partial feeds.
88. Don’t use Akismet, or any way of stopping spam.
89. Don’t keep up-to-date with the latest news in your niche.
90. Focus on traffic and ignore content quality.
91. Choose a url with-more-than-one-hyphen.
92. Change your url.
93. Write an exaggerated ‘How I…’ article.
94. Use an unreliable host.
95. Have your content below the fold.
96. Have large blocks of text, with no paragraphs or breaks.
97. Leave out relevant images or videos that could support your post.
98. Email people to ask them to ‘Digg’ your crappy post.
99. Have 40 ’socialize’ icons at the bottom of each post.
100. Have a contest that requires lots of effort by the participant, with a $10 prize.
…and most importantly
101. Don’t have a website! 
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Awesome list. I swear I’ve had clients that could mark of over half of these from their current website. Definitely some great points here.
CBD - Hi Mike. Good to see you around here. I’ve sporadically been following your work over the last few months. Glad to see things are going well.
Experience is the best teacher for these things. I hope the post can help those who haven’t learned yet.
Thumbs up! Thanks for sharing. This is very helpful for me and other as well. A must read article I might say
Cheers~
Interesting what was under the dateline in the email
A very helpful list, all in all. I may link to it from our site under ‘helpful hints to prospective clients’.
Thanks!
hehe tres funny and sadly more often than not its all true!
not diferentiating between words and links is shocking!
One thing which i’ve also noticed and annoys me is the use of Georgia font and firefox, in its out of the box configuration, swap it for sans serif which makes the page un-readable!!
Rafie - You’re very welcome my friend.
Karl - I’m not sure I get you buddy. Can you clarify? Are you subscribed to emailed updates, and is there something odd about it?
If you have any recognition of decent web design, these are quite basic. However, many need to take heed to them. They just don’t recognise the visual, and practical pain we suffer when visiting their sites.
Si - Good to have you here.
Yeah, I could point to an extremely popular, and well known site which was designed by a respected web developer, but doesn’t differentiate their links properly.
Are you saying that Georgia is unreadable in Firefox under certain settings? If that’s the case, I’d guess you’re using a Windows machine, and you don’t have Clear-Type turned on. That’s just a guess though.
On another note, are you an Arsenal supporter?? Tut! Tut! Go on United!!
lol! Sure am!! Gooner for life mate! Man-Ure are the team i like the least at the moment ha!
As for the problem with Georgia, its something i cant figure out, i’ve got firefox version 2.0.0.12 it renders all gorgia fonts out as sans serif. I’ve experimented by adding different font CSS style attributes and it doesnt revert to the second ‘alternate’ font it simply swaps it out everytime. Firefox does have a font setting which effects it but you can only choose between two sans fonts and a size!
You’re right tho, im on a windows machine with cleartype on. I just always have to swap to IE to view the pages in question! I’ve had to switch all designs to helvetica/arial : (
@Armen, yeah, you’ve made quite the splash yourself lately. I’ve seen your site everywhere. Look forward to see some of your new work.
Mike
Armen,
I was poking a little fun at number 98, and:
[Please digg this. It would be much appreciated]
I wasn’t serious of course, but I could see the humorous side of it
Guilty myself of one or two of those…
On WotUThink.com I currently have the default header still present (still developing it). So I will have to fix that soon..
Good list Armen.
If it wasn’t so serious it would be hilarious! It’s right on the ball. I see all these things and worse every day.
I’m almost too embarrassed these days to tell people that I develop Web sites for a living!
Everyone knows someone who can build a Web site, there’s nothing to it (hehehe, I don’t think!), “Web site, Oh yes, my wife’s sister’s, nephew’s 5 year old does them and only charges $5.00 for 10 pages”!
Well done, Mike!
Si - Ah…you were doing well, but they just aren’t good enough.
I did a very quick research of your browser problem, but I didn’t find anything identical. I’d be tempted to reinstall FF to see if that helps.
Mike - Thanks man. Just trying it out…I’ve been in hiding long enough.
Karl - Doh! Sorry, it’s not your sense of humour which is the problem, I’m just a bit slow.
I hope that any time I encourage my readers to submit an article to the social media sites, that it’s actually something worthy of submitting. Of course, you have to wait until I encourage you
Jermayn - Hey man, I’m guilty of a couple, and I wrote it!
Fred - Yeah, we’re up against it. Software is just too easily acquired I suppose, and those who are ignorant, think if you have the right tools, then you must be capable of doing a good job. If that was the case, I might take up joinery!
1. Pack your site full of Adsense within the content.
Hooray for this. Made my day.
Dennison - I’m glad I could bring joy to your day
“9. Have a huge header, especially of yourself.” - Okay, so I’m guilty..
Nice post, really made me laugh a couple of times, as I realized previous and current “faulty” approaches to my blog.
Recently redesigned and “repositioned” my own blog, so I’m hoping that my content will be more focused, and loose all the “Today I did this..”-posts. That’s why I added a sideblog
Anyways, I like your articles, and feed is saved to NetVibes! Keep it going!
Eivind - lol. No my friend…that is not huge. I can’t remember where I seen a really huge one, or I’d give you a link to it.
We’ve all made mistakes. Your current design is very clean, and has a nice use of colour and whitespace. However, your images seem to be floating right, and so the image on the homepage looks a little off.
Thanks for subscribing
Uhhhh - I am guilty of number…but it is due too lack of time, not lack of want
Number 25 has just been hit home for me.
Someone I know decided he wanted to have a website, and after hosting it on his home machine for a while, he gave up due to ISP constantly changing IPs (even though I did mention no-ip.com and it’s ilk).
He then moved to a ‘free’ web hosting company after I offered him free space on one of our servers, and has found that while they generously offer a free guest book, it appears they’re harvesting these emails for nefarious purposes.
Sure enough, I took a look at terms and conditions, and there is nothing regarding the protection of email addresses (or any other private information) mentioned.
Why couldn’t he have just taken the offer of a free account? (it’s not like they’re short of money anyway - some people are just frustrating!)
Mark - I know the feeling! At least now I’ve reminded you to add it to your To-Do list
I didn’t know Steven Snell had started another site (learned from your blog).
Karl - Sometimes ‘FREE’ speaks louder than what wisdom might declare. Experience however, tends to slap ‘free’ in the face, although it may take a while
thoughtful/thought-provoking.
Thanks.
Now if I could only spell and write properly….
Nice list and idea
Thanks for the article!
Hmm, huge header, check (though it’s not me at least)
Lack of search bar, check
Random posts about nothing in particular, check (though getting better, kinda new to the whole blogging thing really)
I think that might be about it, so I guess I’m not as bad off a I could be!