What are your personal website pet peeves?

[shevek]

i mean in my experience ive seen a dni or two that have genuinely made me say "oh i want nothing to do with this person" so i can say that its not completely ineffective.

Fair, me too definitely, but I am pretty sure (I hope!) that it wasn't because you were the racist mentioned in the dni

[pinkvampyr]

Fair, me too definitely, but I am pretty sure (I hope!) that it wasn't because you were the racist mentioned in the dni

pffff no ofc not. usually just someone with bad takes on trans people that they just broadcast out to the world.

[Memory]

I have a lot of pet peeves, a lot of things I found very poor and questionable design choices, most of them I can tolerate, even the dreaded autoplay music I can silence the tab despite the initial distress but what really makes me leave a website instantly is impossible to read content. That can come in many flavors: poor color combinations, tiny fonts or overly-decorated, etc. If I can't read your content even with zoom or by selecting it then so sorry but bye.

[Skykristal]

uh I noticed I haven't put my two cents into this thread before, so lets go

First of, most things are completely fine to me and everyone surely has their preferences for websites. But I do have some things that genuinely bother me. Some were already mentioned here before but I'm going to list them too, also to add some of my opinions.

1. low contrast and tiny text.. nightmare. Tiny text is still somewhat okay to me but low contrast, especially in combination is too much. I always wonder what the people who were designing this thought when they did it. They either have some different screen settings which makes it easier or they are wizards. Seriously, some of it is unreadable unless you switch to read mode or select text. And trust me my eyesight is good.

2. mobile In my opinion you don't need a mobile version of your website as long as it is accessible. But I also feel like some people don't quite understand what mobile-friendly means. If I can see your whole page from header to footer squished in the top corner of my phone you designed it in a way that things aren't all over the place but this is not a mobile website nor nicely accessible from a phone. But I will say if the whole site is movable and I can reach things, It doesn't bother me too much. But shouldn't be labeled as mobile-friendly or mobile view in my opinion.

3. text and background I see this even on popular personal sites, where the text color is obviously unreadable because of the background image behind it. Just like with the tiny text and low contrast, I wonder how things like this come together. I mean you literally can't read it, even as the one writing it. Not only that but, I also think it just looks terrible. (and I also think this is a poor "old web" choice.) old web doesn't mean you should turn your site into a nightmare :'D

4. website buttons I dunno, maybe that's just me but whenever I stumble across a site that has its own button literally everywhere but doesn't collect or show a single button from other sites it feels kinda rude. It of course up to you if you want to have a collection or not but I always found that if people share my site, and link to me I could at least give some support and linking back to a few others as well. but idk.. maybe that's just me.

5. no menus /links , or unclear menus. Sometimes I even have to search for it. Especially on websites that seem interesting, I find this pretty frustrating as I wanna see more.
+ Websites that don't show any kind of hover state, or making clear this is a link. I see this super often on splash screens/ landing pages. I move and click around until something works or I see an url popping up lol. On a lot of my content I like to make some kind of animation (as I'm not too much of a fan of underlines) so that also colorblind people can see it. I don't do this everywhere but in a lot of places. I mean.... I want this to be an obvious link people can click on. I don't want to hide it from them.

[wygolvillage]

I agree with all the points about immediately jumping into DNI and discourse and pride flag opinions etc etc. Neocities and the personal web is a unique space that's removed from the greater "outrage culture" of social media, so why bring that "outrage culture" into that space? I don't get it.

[plantovision]

Also inline styling <body background="red"> etc unless there is a veryyyy good reason for it!

Uh oh.


On the topic of mobile compatibility, my site is (for the most part) mobile friendly. Even then, I think that it may be a bit much to ask a beginner, hobbyist web-designer to create an adaptive layout (for those not using a layout builder). Most people get into web-design because they enjoy doing it, but if they're just a hobbyist, technical problems such as those could easily discourage them.

[debleb]

sites without any warnings for stuff like autoplay, flashing gifs, no mobile support or just generally anything else someone might need to know before visiting you site. it’s one thing to have that kind of stuff, people can do whatever they want on their site and some people are insistent on autoplay and flashing colours, or don’t want to make a mobile site for whatever reason, but you should really add like a splash page warning or something! autoplay sounds when you weren’t expecting them can be really jarring, and nobody wants to be the person who accidentally plays some loud bgm song in public. plus flashing colours are so bad to have unwarned for a lot of reasons- even if there wasn’t a genuine risk to peoples health i don’t think as many people want to see ten billion flashing blinkies on the index page as some computer spiders think!

other than that, sites with very little actual content and just like, links to social medias and a kin list or something. you can do whatever the hell you want on your site again but.. i feel like it’s just sort of pointless to make a whole site that’s basically just a glorified twitter profile. makes it seem like you only have a site because it’s the latest trendy retro thing to do. i mean at least chuck in a blog or a shrine or something to give any point at all to visiting your site.

and finally (and sort of relatedly) sites with a ton of empty links. it’s okay if your site is still under construction but imo it’s better to only add your links in once the page is done or at least in a state where you can see what’s going to be there. and if you want your links to already be there for layout reasons or something, make it clear what links work and what ones don’t either with styling or by just leaving it as text without a link.

[Azure]

too many flashing graphics and text that isn't easily readable (too small, bad color contrast with the background, etc) are the two things that get to me the most. i honestly think i can forgive anything else someone does with their site but the flashing graphics and unreadable text have me clicking off the site pretty much the instant i set my eyes on it.

[nenrikido]

I have a lot, but I think the one I run into the most is non-responsive websites. A lot of people seem to think responsiveness is only relevant in the context of mobile displays, but it's also irritating to have to alter the zoom on websites to make it render the way the webmaster intended. Especially because it's not very difficult to resolve; just use flex or grid, stop positioning everything with absolute, and try using rem/em instead of px.

[Melooon]

⚑ Moderators Note ⚑

A number of posts have been held back from this thread for moderation! If yours is missing and you have questions about why feel free to contact me!

I'd like to remind people that this forum (and particularly this board) is for discussion of web crafting as a technical and artistic activity - its not for debates about neocities culture.

Also please remember that use of acronyms or other terms that are not universally known without a clear explanation is not allowed on this forum! Please keep your posts accessible to all members of the web who might be reading from diffrent backgrounds or age groups!

Feel free to continue posting pet peeves after this message, but remember to keep them on topic!

[starbreaker]

I'm a little peeved at the moment by the continued existence of Open Graph Protocol and Twitter Cards. I get it: parasocial media platforms want to provide pretty previews when people share links. But instead of using standard elements already in <head> like <title> or <meta name="description"> they come up with these proprietary tags that webkeepers are expected to deal with.

I actually got an email from somebody who tried to share a link to my site on Facebook but "couldn't" because "it didn't look good." I'm going to give them something to cry about; any link to my site that gets shared on Facebook will go to this page: https://starbreaker.org/about/parasocial/

All links on Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord, etc should end up there, too. Mastodon, too. :)

[Yukari]

This is a super non-issue, but sometimes I see people upload the 88x31s buttons of specific websites w/o linking back, because (I think) they think it's a generic decoration. Again, I know this isn't really worth complaining about, because the whole point of making these tiny graphics is to have them shared around. Plus, people on the indie web are savvy about things like reverse-image search, so visitors can always do that to find the source... but then, that made me realize, the site owner also could have done that lol

[kiki & ayano]

reading about the pet peeves in regards to accessibility on this thread have been enlightening, thank you everyone! despite working on sites for a while, i still feel like a newbie in some ways, and accessibility is one of those. i'm still updating my sites to be more accessible over time. it's a learning process but a worthwhile one! i'm disabled myself and don't want to leave my fellow disabled people out if i can help it.

as for my own personal pet peeves, it's mainly what some other folks on this thread have mentioned... websites that only serve as pretty much an alternative to a twitter bio/carrd, or popular sites on neocities that don't actually have any content. my favorite sites are ones where i can learn something new or interact with something interesting... the novelty of returning to the aesthetics present in the internet of my youth has long worn off, and i can't imagine being satisfied just looking at a bunch of nostalgic imagery for the sake of nostalgia imagery. if i can't stick around on a website long enough than it takes to scroll past a tweet because there's no "meat" to be engaged with, what's the point? (this doesn't include websites that are still being built and have content in the works, of course)

that being said, while i list this as something that irritates me, i do have empathy for young people especially who have carrd-like sites - i think kids now are so used to the confines of social media, it's a process to actually branch out and exercise those self-expression muscles. plus, most kids now don't have the sort of casual introduction to HTML/CSS that i and many others did as kids, such as BBcode which is essentially simplified CSS, or decking out the likes of classic MySpace profiles, so they're really coming in from scratch and it may feel overwhelming to do anything more than what they're used to. starting anywhere, even if it's just a biography with a lot of pretty images, is better than nothing and a potentially exciting start to putting more! every "bad" site with no content could be someone's gateway into making more interesting and passionate websites.

a few other smaller things i can't stand include placeholder links that don't actually go anywhere yet (even worse if they're actual clickable links, and even worse yet if they redirect to a "page not found" URL, or a page that simply says "under construction", forcing me to navigate backwards) - i feel like it would just be better to keep a WIP list somewhere else if displaying what you'll have in the future is important to you. it always makes me feel a bit disappointed. oh, and javascript games, tools, and whatnot that don't properly sit on the page! i know that people usually just copy/paste their javascript stuff from elsewhere, but at the very least, i feel it's worth putting in the effort to have it not jut out strangely or sit out of place in the flow of the page. it's just super distracting.

- ayano

[wygolvillage]

I agree with all the points above about "Carrd-likes"... It's disappointing when I click on a site only to find there's no real content on it beyond links to socials, but I won't let it ruin my day 

[Yukari]

Okay this is another inconsequential problem but when links are too short and hard to click I don’t like that. I didn’t realize how inconvenient it was until I did it on my own website.

i.e., a link name like EP1 versus Episode 1.