I am passionate about the web. I painstakingly study everything from color theory to web server security. During the past 6 or so years as a web designer/developer, I have had the time to assemble a list of things I feel help a web site fail to provide a pleasant user experience.

Perhaps your site is guilty of a few of these, but fear not. Most are very easily remedied and I am of course always available to review your site with you to pinpoint portions that can be improved to help you turn more visitors into clients or customers.

Lets start at the beginning.

  1. Flash Intros. There's nothing more annoying that clicking a link to site, waiting, then being forced to sit through horribly cheesy animations using cute phrases flying around the screen, only to be forced to wait again for the actual site to load. Still some people seem to swear by these things - the least they can do is make sure there is a "skip intro" link. You can bet most visitors are going right for it. Oh, and by the way, that fancy flash intro scares away search engine spiders too.
  2. Scrolling marque text. This is similar to the flash intro in that it is distracting, annoying and usually done in completely bad taste. If the text is important enough to have scrolling across the screen, its probably important enough to place somewhere prominent to be clearly read without your eyes having to chase. Again, search engine spiders can't read Javascript, which usually powers these things.
  3. Horrid color schemes. If you wouldn't paint the walls of your business in horrible, headache inducing colors, why would you do it to your web site? Give our eyes a break and use pleasant and inviting color schemes.
  4. Animated Gifs. Any crappy little animation on the page does nothing but distract your visitor away from the important things. Granted there are exceptions to this rule.
  5. Backgrounds with the web site or business name repeating all over the page. Any designer that still does this really hasn't the slightest idea about anything tasteful whatsoever.
  6. Frames. I have yet to find a good design that utilizes frames. If you find one, please let me know.
  7. Blinking Ads saying I've won something. I know I didn't win now go away.

I'll be adding to this list over time. Who could think of all the things that annoy them in one sitting without becoming annoyed by the combined ideas existing together?