There is a portion of the web design industry that just doesn’t seem to ‘get’ etiquette and proceeds to treat website visitors like cows to be milked for all the clicks and information possible. Don’t get me wrong, clicks are good and information about the visitors to your site is even better, but more and more websites (or rather, the designers behind them) are making a complete pig’s ear of the website experience and alienating visitors in the process.

So, without further ado, here’s a list of ten things to avoid as a designer:

1. Popups are Bad.
   This should go without saying now, but people still have popups opening (or trying to open) when a visitor lands.  Consider it this way: A visitor to your site wants to see a page and read some information and that it all. Popups ‘break out’ of the page they are trying to read and annoy the hell out of your visitor.
2. Site Surveys.
   An increasing number of sites are showing in-document popups asking visitors to take short surveys or share their thoughts. Nothing wrong with that, but when the popup appears as soon as the visitor lands, obscuring the very content they want to read, they’ll get annoyed.
3. Don’t prevent the user from leaving.
   Your customer has just finished reading something and decided they don’t want to go any further so they click ‘Back’ or close the window only to receive a requester imploring them to stay. “Are you sure you want to leave this page?” Please don’t insult your visitors’ intelligence like this – they have finished with your site.
4. Intrusive ads annoy.
   I realise that many ads are pulled from a pool, and that designers cannot always decide on what ads are shown, but if you fail to check the kind of ads being shown on your site and your visitors are driven away by distracting, bandwidth-hogging video or seizure-inducing strobe-fests, you have only yourself to blame.
5. Infected ads annoy even more.
   As the website owner, profiting from the showing of ads on your site, you have a responsibility to check that you are not damaging visitors’ machines with trojan-laden ads. Read the news, check the ads on your own site occasionally and stay on top of things.
6. There is no Jump.
   This is mainly US writers that have moved from print to online media. The phrase “After the jump” does not apply when the item you are talking about appears right after the very words describing it.
7. Test your site in all major browsers.
   Until recently, Expedia UK still had issues displaying skyscraper ads on a 1024-wide screen in Google Chrome. This isn’t Chrome’s fault since other sites manage just fine, it’s lack of testing. By default your site should work in the last two full versions (not just point releases) of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.  You don’t even have to mess about loading different browsers – BrowserShots.org will do the hard work for you.
8. Don’t spread your article to show more ads.
   If your article is a whopper, then by all means break it up into logical sections with proper titles to aid navigation. Spreading it over multiple pages titled 1, 2, 3 etc just to show increase your ad impressions is a dirty, dishonest trick, however.
9. New windows are for external sites only.
   When linking to another page on the same website, you don’t need to open it in a new window – if the user wants that to happen, they can do it themselves with a right click, a control click or whatever their browser supports.  When you send a visitor to another website, then you should open a new window – emphasising the fact it is separate from your site and outside your control.
10. Don’t Bait & Switch.
    Another ad-related no-no – more and more posts on social media sites are linking to a page which then goes on to link  to the article the visitor thought they were getting – again, all in the name of ad impressions. It’s another dirty trick – don’t do it.

These tips, rules, does and don’ts etc are all about improving the visitor’s experience. A happy visitor is one that will return, an annoyed one will remember your site and choose to go elsewhere.

Errors? Opinions? Feel free to leave a comment.