What are your personal website pet peeves?

[brisray]

I agree with everyone has said so far about their pet peeves. I had to smile though, especially as they appear on a site commited to the "web revival". Nearly every site in the original personal web space from the 1990s/2000s, mine included, had multiple issues. Some people had almost every item brought up in these posts on a single page.

To give some context:

Take my 20-year old page at https://brisray.com/misc/misc1.htm. It was made full width because anything over a 860 X 640 (vga) monitor was almost professional grade. Who could afford anything more than that?

The background image was one I found, a good job I lightened it a bit from the original but who really cared if the text was readable? We were happy to get anyone visiting the sites at all.

These old "top down" pages still work well on mobile screens because phones automaticaly change the pixel width of the pages and their contents to whatever their screens use and don't have to worry about moving content around too much.

My own pet peeve is broken links (link rot). If you have any sort of list to external sites, you'll lose more and more of them every year. I use an ancient program called Xenu's Link Sleuth to try and find the ones on my sites. With thousands of links it's hard to keep up with them all, but I try. For sites that have gone AWOL, if I can, I'll change the link to whatever the Internet Archive has saved.

Just to be certain, I love that personal sites still exist and haven't yet been drowned out. If you like pink text in some unreadable font on a white background well, at least it's yours.

[Memory]

Thank you, brisray. That Xenu Link Sleuth is a very helpful program indeed, it just seems to miss some new HTTPS ciphers.

Speaking of which, I think it should be well weighted if HTTPS is necessary for a personal web page. HTTPS ciphers are a blown-up artifical market, which only makes sense for maybe 1% of all sites, where serious traffic happens. But everything without a login screen doesn't really need it. This topic is fired up by all big browsers, which call standard HTTP sites "insecure" by default.

[Memory]

Speaking of which, I think it should be well weighted if HTTPS is necessary for a personal web page. HTTPS ciphers are a blown-up artifical market, which only makes sense for maybe 1% of all sites, where serious traffic happens. But everything without a login screen doesn't really need it. This topic is fired up by all big browsers, which call standard HTTP sites "insecure" by default.

Y E S, thank you for bringing it up.
A lot of people don't realize this since neocities does that out of the box but oh boy, the ordeal is real. We don't need the blessing of https to traffic gifs and silly texts.

[aoeu]

Thank you, brisray. That Xenu Link Sleuth is a very helpful program indeed, it just seems to miss some new HTTPS ciphers.

Speaking of which, I think it should be well weighted if HTTPS is necessary for a personal web page. HTTPS ciphers are a blown-up artifical market, which only makes sense for maybe 1% of all sites, where serious traffic happens. But everything without a login screen doesn't really need it. This topic is fired up by all big browsers, which call standard HTTP sites "insecure" by default.

To play devil's advocate, HTTPS protects users from MITM attacks by bad actors looking to inject anything from obtrusive advertisements to literal malware into victims' web pages when they are served over plain HTTP. This has already happened on several different occasions, and it's not unreasonable to assume that, given the opportunity, bad actors will use code injection attacks as a means of extracting as much revenue as possible from their victims.

[Memory]

To play devil's advocate, HTTPS protects users from MITM attacks by bad actors looking to inject anything from obtrusive advertisements to literal malware into victims' web pages when they are served over plain HTTP. This has already happened on several different occasions, and it's not unreasonable to assume that, given the opportunity, bad actors will use code injection attacks as a means of extracting as much revenue as possible from their victims.

You're right with these things, but I think it would be more important to secure the browser itself. The root problem is the browser executing code (JavaScript, Flash, ActiveX for example). If code execution would be restricted or even prohibited completly in the first place, lots of those problems of unencrypted traffic become irrelevant. Intrusive ads should be destroyed on other fronts, if you ask me (filter lists and script blocking for example). Though I remember a man-in-the-middle attack, where website text was altered to give things a different meaning. That's evil indeed and hard to discover. However if the encryption certificate is compromised or decrypted (beware of superfast computers out there), it's rather a false sense of security that comes with the "S" of HTTPS. So no guarantees unfortuneatly.

[TheNothingMonster]

Oh man, my site falls under some of the categories mentioned here. I agree with a lot of points and I will consider everyone's opinions while working!

My sins:

1) JavaScript as Foundation: My site requires a browser with JavaScript enabled or otherwise it will not work at all. That is due to some "shortcuts" I have taken while coding. I would have used PHP instead if Neocities supported it.
2) Not Sharing Buttons: I am one of those who showcase their 88x31 buttons but have not linked anyone else back in return. That is because I have yet to make an "external links" page! I have gathered a lot of buttons from others and I really want to add them some time. ^^
3) Screen Adaptability: Thanks to my wonky CSS skill set, my site sometimes works on smaller screens and mobiles... and sometimes it doesn't.

My pet-peeves:

1) Autoplay: I also have an issue with autoplay, especially if there have not been any warnings prior and the sound is very loud and sudden. I get spooked!
2) Text Size: I refuse to read tiny text for my eyes' sake. :P
3) Pop-ups: While browser pop-ups might be informative, I find them quite annoying. I have come across instances where pop-ups were used as warnings on index/home pages, which were useful at first, but became a bit frustrating to deal with once you have to load/visit the page over and over again.
4) Dead Ends: Unfinished pages or links that get you into 404 pages, especially without an indicator. I do not have a problem in most scenarios, unless the entire site consists of non-existent, "Under Construction" or "Work In Progress" pages.

Stuff I do not mind that much:

1) Carrd-like Sites: It's their site. I cannot tell them what to do. Though, I have got to admit that it takes the fun out of web creation if the code is copy+pasted. If they made it themselves, sure! I don't care!
2) No Meat, Just Decoration: I do not mind seeing sites that are just aesthetic without much context to rely on. I think they are really beautiful in some cases. It is a different approach to most common personal sites. Again, they can do whatever they want with their site.

These are some subjects I could think about for now.

[Memory]

 

Also if the next website is broken so you can't continue

It's annoying if the menu is difficult to find (maybe it doesn't exist?) and then if you click on the menu to go to a different section, the menu disappears so you need to return to the front page with the browser's back button to browse the other links.

I AGREE i hate this too! XO

[Memory]

when the webpage is too unoptimized and just has a buncha unnecessary garbage on it. rly grinds my gears when smth just causes my computer's fans to go mental

[brisray]

All sorts of things are niggly to me. Some have been already been mentioned

Navigtion that is difficult to use.

Broken webrings - around 2/3 of them end up in a broken link.

Links to other sites that end up trapped in the original site's iframe.

Low contrast between the text and the background.

Parallax Scrolling - They all end up with some massive images, a long wait time to load, some headlines, and nothing of interest. Creative Bloq's "18 beautiful parallax scrolling websites" are all either broken or look crap. The article was only published in April and they may as well have just pointed to W3Schools example page.

[brisray]

Also whatever this is.

[Semper]

I'm really not a fan of moving backgrounds. In particular the ones that glide from the lower left corner to the upper right corner and vice versa. They're usually that checkered pattern that I've seen a few personal sites on neocities use. I close the tab immediately when I'm faced with a background that moves, especially if webmaster has placed a block of text right in the middle of it, doubly so if they don't even allow for a browser reader option. It activates my motion sickness something bad, and in some cases actually leaves me laid out for a few hours as my eyes and brain recover.

[Capybara]

- Text too big or too small and having to zoom in (or out) to read it
- I can forgive not being mobile responsive, but if a site isn't viewable even when I put my phone in desktop mode I just exit out entirely.
- Autoplay BGM with no way to pause (80% a thing of the past but I've run into it on new sites a few times)
- Random sound effects when clicking, HUGE misophonia trigger 
- No email or non-social media contact info

[Memory]

for me, the number one annoyance is definitely moving backgrounds, like @Semper  - they make me super motion sick! twinkling stars and other types of flashing or something are okay, but scrolling repeating designs like they described make me feel like i'm gonna throw up. not to as extreme a degree (i don't need time to recover) but it still isn't fun.

i get a little annoyed when i get excited to check out a page someone has on their site... but they haven't finished it yet so the link doesn't work or there's not much to look at! but i do that myself, so it's not like it's something i think people should stop doing or anything

on the web in general, i hate the recentish professionalweb trend of super wide super low-content websites? i don't know how to describe it exactly, the ones where it's just a series of maximum-width boxes, each with one big photo and/or one or two sentences in a massive font. usually they have some fadein/fadeout animations when you scroll down. i think it's a squarespace or wix template or something. they look very polished, but they're so annoying to actually go to! you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the long page through a bunch of useless slogans to find links to anything useful, which are usually all as small as possible to boot. the massive text makes it feel way too loud!

[brisray]

super wide super low-content websites

There's more of those appearing than ever.

The web landscape is changing. Google has been doing things to how their search engine works. There were updates in 2022, 2023 and another update in March this year. SEO specialists have been constantly moaning about them. Personally, I think building a business wholly dependent on what another company, which you have absolutely no control over, does might not have been the best business plan.

Something else that have started appearing are page wide banner ads taking up half the length of the page. Those things were crap in the 1990s and are just as nasty now.

[Sailor_Fabulous]

The super-wide low content ones annoy me too! But not just in the shiny new way, or even just low content.

My main gripe is sites that are: full width, too small, or way too justified to one side of the screen or the other. I acknowledge that some part is played by screen width, but I just can't stand opening a page and seeing the text go all the way from the left of the screen to the right when I'm on my laptop or desktop. Obviously fine (and probably preferred) on mobile.

On the opposite of that, I find a lot of old websites (and new ones imitating those) are really really small, right in the middle screen or all the way on one side of the screen and barely taking up half of it. It's just really hard to read and engage with, and probably not great for my eyes or my neck when I have to twist to one side or else de-centre myself. Of course I usually just zoom in if I really want to see the the content of the site, but most of the time I just won't bother.

I also hate when there's a crinkly paper-type texture background and really thin font for the text on it, it's so hard to read!

Lastly I'm not a fan of primarily text-based sites (often linked with those other issues), but I acknowledge that some people are into that, I'm just not likely to stick around.

When these things are on personal websites it's not a big deal because the site is for them, not me, and I can just go elsewhere, but when it's a site where someone is trying to share something and actively wants people to read and engage, I find it really frustrating!