What do you find annoying about websites?

[Kalka]

Empty dead pages. Like the person started a few lines of code with ideas and all and... nothing. You just see "copyright 2015" or "last update 01-04-2021". I can't help but wonder about those people. Did they gave up ? Did something happen ? I'm not looking for a full site but seeing a lot of empty layouts and dead pages are mildy annoying.

[Codachrome]

its hard for me to read certain serifed fonts, so whenever an entire paragraph is written in it, my brain freaks out

[larvapuppy]

This is a really specific thing but when websites use emojis instead of paying a graphic designer for decor (or even looking for free graphics online) it's annoying, ugly, and makes me take them less seriously. Especially on online storefronts it's super unprofessional and makes companies seem like fake or scam companies. It reminds me of how AI bros type and how Instagram users decorate their posts, so not something I want to see when I am looking at a website for research or looking to buy something.

[st3phvee]

Also whatever this is.

MY EYES.

As for me, my pet peeve is sites with dark/light mode that don't also have an auto option. My whole system automatically swaps over to dark mode at 5pm, and it irritates me to have to manually change websites over to dark mode. If you're going to go through the trouble of offering visitors the option of toggling between dark and light mode, it's not hard to give the option to respect the visitor's system preferences. I'm more forgiving if it's a small site, but for a site like Reddit to not have it... <shakes head>

[H0ppin_H00ligan]

I'm primary on mobile so it really bugs me when a site is meant to be viewed on a BIG monitor and so a lot of the assets are squished together and hard to read/interact with on mobile. Normally i'm okay if a site isn't optimized for mobile devices since i mainly use a tablet and thus it's KIIIIINNNDAAAAAAA computer desktop-shaped, but on the rare occasion it does kinda hinder my experience on a site.

[KiwiMeowo]

I feel like this thread can be used as advice for me, I use webp images as I heard they support better quality at lower file size, but I didn't know much about whether it's accessible to most computers!


So my nickpicks:

For regular sites, I notice a lot of these that restrict users and beg them to get a subscription.

I sometimes visit some websites to get answers for my homeowork, and they would ask me to create an account. While annoying, I just put in my info cuz I didn't have much choice. And after I created the account, only then they mention I'd need to pay a subscription to check the post I needed. How awful.

I also hate those websites (Like Twitter and those websites that have mobile apps) which when you access them in mobile browsers, they will force you to download the app to see the content. Like I'd rather view their stuff on desktop than download their useless app that I would use one time max.

As for indie sites, most people here already mentioned the problems: Autoplaying, low contrast text and background, little content aside from links.

When it comes to personal sites, I find entrances (or whatever they're called) to often serve as no more than a roadblock which makes you look for the entrance button, then to wait again for the actual home page to load.

Landing pages can look quite great sometimes, but yea I hate it when the enter button is very obscure. I can understand if the webmaster wants to make sure the viewer has read the warnings by making the enter button not that obvious, like "Click the levitating guy to enter!". But I'm generally fine with the warnings put on the site (Unless it's adult themed but I generally don't encounter them a lot), so it just annoys me.

[Adam]

I feel like this thread can be used as advice for me, I use webp images as I heard they support better quality at lower file size, but I didn't know much about whether it's accessible to most computers!

You can have it both ways, actually!

Instead of just using the traditional <img src="MyPicture.webp">, you can add the more modern <picture> tag too, like this:

Code

<picture>
        <source srcset="MyPicture.webp" type="image/webp">
        <source srcset="MyPicture.jpg" type="image/jpeg">
        <img src="MyPicture.jpg" alt="A Picture of my cat">
</picture>

A modern-ish browser will pick from the srcset list; if it can't display the webp, it'll skip to the next one, a jpg.
An old browser that doesn't support the <picture> tag at all will just ignore it completely and use the <img src> tag. 
For extra points, use progressive jpgs, too! 

I do this on my blog and displays the pictures perfectly, even on super old browsers like NCSA Mosaic.


As for the things that I find annoying, absolutely it's auto-playing music. What makes auto-playing music especially annoying is that it will usually cause whatever I'm already listening to to stop, so once I figure out how to stop the page's music, I also need to restart whatever I had playing before.

Another thing is terrible text/bg color combinations. I don't know if it's intentional but sometimes the colors are so poorly contrasted that I can't read anything unless I ctrl-a first. 

Last is blogs, forums, or newsletters without RSS feeds. RSS is life.

[cute]

Some websites have a lot of distracting elements. I wish they were more cozy like they wanted you to spend time there. Some shops, for example, have "Win a deal" popups that ask you to spin a wheel. Also sites not friendly to mobile unfortunately, sometimes I do wanna check in on my phone.

[virtualpet2001]

Websites regarding mature content that either don't have an age warning or have one that's too low really upset me >_<
in general the super-sleek "phone-friendly" web design formula just doesnt look good to me at all. often it lags my actual phone as well!
Extravagant detailed elaborate fonts meant for headers being used for the entire body text... or super tiny text. though that last one isn't so bad, since i can just zoom in

[littlelum]

This is for both indie and commercial web, and apps too, but it really bugs me when part of the screen gets cut off. My computer's default zoom is 150% (laptop screen), so it gets really annoying to need to open up windows settings just to see something properly.

[lakes]

for indie websites, i hate when music doesn't have a pause/play button because either my browser stopped it from autoplaying and i want to hear it OR i want it to stop playing because i'm listening to something else
for the corporate web, i hate when articles are hidden behind a paywall ESPECIALLY when it's an article on how misinformation is rampant or on how subscriptions suck. i get a girl's gotta eat but there's a certain hypocrisy to it that annoys me and found out from michael o'burns from youtube that academics don't even get paid by the people profiting off of & publishing their work this way. it just sucks

[Skykristal]

Coming back to this thread because I keep seeing links with nothing behind them without making them unclickable, less opaque or crossed out. It's quite annoying. And for some reason it's always links I wanted to discover most

[dogbrain]

i’m interested in the replies mentioning dysfunctional links (like the one above), since i tend to put those in place of an unfinished page xD from the perspective of someone just browsing a site, i definitely get mildly disappointed seeing an interesting-looking link that goes nowhere too. BUT from a webmaster perspective i understand why someone would want to keep those links up… i’m flighty when formatting my site layout so i like to keep placeholders to remind me what i need to work on and replace later :-P

i guess it’s a matter of perspective. only the webmaster knows what their creative vision is for their site, so crossed-out links may not be as big of a deal to them (since they probably intend to fix them later). a random viewer lacks that knowledge though, so broken links are more likely to irritate them… at least that’s my theory 


as far as my own grievances go, most of them have already been brought up in this thread, but it irks me when a landing page contains the triggers it warns for, if that make sense? like i saw one that warned for bright colors and flashing gifs, but the page itself was really bright and had flashing gifs on it… it really defeats the purpose of the content warning lol

[moeghost]

when the music doesnt have a pause button...which is hypocritical of me to say since the pause button on my homepage doesnt work at the moment and im too lazy to change it until whenever i decide to refresh my homepage there always the mute sound option on my browser, tho

[BasilABST]

Websites that attempt to support non-English language formats but somehow screw it up! My native language is written the opposite way, and sometimes websites try to accommodate for it, all of our computer UIs are flipped because of it, etc etc. That's good! But sometimes, it really screws up and it's kinda blatant that they did not really give enough of a dang to actually get it right be it severe formatting errors or stuff like that, or YouTube and its ungodly auto-dubbing...