• They're a mile long!
  Slow connections make it bad enough, but you putting everything on one page only makes it worse. Divide it up into a few sections so people can look at what they want to and don't need to wade through everything else.
• They put scrolling text in a sacred place.
  The bottom line of the screen belongs to me, not you. You can put what you want in the main areas of the screen, but I want the bottom area to tell me where your links will lead me. I don't want to have to fight with your java applet to see what I want. There's more than enough ways for you to put your message in the main part of the screen.
• They use a counter.
  If I return to your pages, it will be because I like what I see there, not because other people do. Likewise, I only hope you return if you find this place worth revisiting. Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't care about how many people visit your own web pages-- it's a good way to see if you're doing a good job-- it's just that I usually don't care about your pages that much. Additionally, I've frequented a lot of pages where the counters are broken anyway. What good is that?
• They use soooo many animated gifs.
  Yes, they're out there, and yes, there are some good uses for them, but if your pages have so much activity on them that people start getting dizzy from all the motion, you need to rethink things.
• Artificial Thumbnail Images
  Real thumbnails are nice. They give you a preview of the images without having to wait for huge files to download. Artificial thumbnails are created when the browser scales down an image after it's received the entire image. If you're sending me the whole set of images, you might as well show them to me full-size right away instead of making me click on each one! Plus, maybe I didn't want to see all the images, just a few.
• Everything is endlessly "Under Construction"
  I'll admit to this being one of my pet peeves. Some hate terms like "Cyberspace," I hate seeing "Under Construction" signs and graphics everywhere, and it's really getting on my nerves. Every web page everywhere is subject to change at a moment's notice so there's no need to restate that all over the place. It is OK to indicate that something is in the process of being actively updated, just don't say "I'll be updating this page any day now" and then leave that statement there for 2 years.
• The backgrounds make the page unreadable!
  I've visited web pages that were literally unreadable because of the colors chosen or because the background had so much variety in it the text didn't stand out enough. The key word in "background" is BACK, people. It should be subtle and unassuming. If you must use a more loud or bold background, be sure that all your text (regular text, unvisited links, visited links, etc.) all appear readable everywhere on the background, because different viewers will place the text in different areas. Increasing the font size of your text may help, too, otherwise the tiny text will get swallowed by the swirling morass behind it.

More irritations will be added as you come up with them.

Last updated 06-Jan-97