Top Five Web Annoyances

Want that coveted link from Southern Man? Don't break these rules.

Slide Shows

There is no reason to put the "Best 100 Rock Songs By Artists Whose First Names Start With The Letter C" (or whatever) on a hundred slow-loading ad-ridden pages. Nor is there any reason to put a seven-paragraph news article on three pages, or a five-item list on two. Yes, cracked.com, I'm talking to you.

Videos that starts on page load

The offenders are many but local news station pages are the worst. If I want to play the video I'll play the video myself, thank you very much. There is nothing so annoying as to be surfing through your favorite news aggregater and opening tabs to read later only to have half of them start spouting video.

Ads or banners that obscure the page until they are dismissed

Yes, we accept that the Web is ad-driven. But believe me when I tell you that no on, and I mean no one, is going to click on an ad that is blocking the rest of a page you're trying to view. That's right, salon.com and hotair.com, no one clicks on those. No one. And the sub-annoyance is hiding the close control in an unusual spot. And the rare uber-annoyance is the fake close control that opens the ad page instead.

Bad / Missing / Too Many Links

No links, or irrelevant links, or missing links. If your story is about a hot new dot-com or someone's web page, give me a link. And if you run a blog, update your blogroll every now and then. I see blogs I once read that have been inactive for sixteen months still listed on big-name blog sidebars. And some of the blogs on my own sidebar are notorious for having a link to a story that goes to another link to the story that goes to yet another link to the story...linkiest.com and askmen.com are frequent offenders here, which is doubly annoying when the former links to the latter.

Background Music

It is not 1995. Stop it, right now. People around me may be trying to work.