Least Favorite Website Elements

Things that flash. Things that auto-scroll (seriously, the scrolling marquee thing should have stayed in the 90's, it's neither cool nor useful). Sites with only one skin, especially one poorly-designed skin (having a colorblind-friendly option or high-contrast option is your friend!). And no, high-contrast does not mean 'make everyone's eyes bleed'.

 

Sites that are made to show how many coding tricks you know, with no mercy for the poor user. Everything flashes, everything hovers, everything slides. Every single picture is a gif. Not a single piece that keeps still. Your app must have six pictures and its own special effects. I am sure you're an amazing coder, but I came here to play...

 

Off the top of my head:
- oversized header
- auto play videos
- infinite scrolling (I'm old school, I believe a page should have an end)
- splash (anything, you name it, though the worst are notices that float with you as you move down the page, irritating)
- oversized footers: hey, a footer should not be the size of my screen.

 

Animated gifs. I just find them incredibly distracting, they drive me bananas; and I know a lot of websites favor them but I just can't imagine being able to write anything with a constant, circular gif going on. Pet peeve, I suppose. >_>

 

Definitely agree. Very distracting, especially on a site dedicated to writing.

 

I encountered this one recently...

-Having a splash image that completely covers the navigation bar, making it next to impossible to actually move off of the front page.

 

I can't stand excessive use of gradient. Gradients are meant to be SUBTLE. Also tables with visible borders are often ugly too =/

 

when the tesxt is so small you can't read it! Drives me bonkers.

 

I agree with the small fonts. I've noticed on many Jcink sites the font is set at 8 or even 6 in some cases. My mum was on one with me, she told the admin she couldn't read the posts without straining her eyes. That admin said 'well no one else is complaining'; which I thought quite rude since Mum is 65, I think they could have taken that into consideration.

Those things that pop up when your mouse goes over them, big pics etc. So annoying. Also popular it seems on Jcink.
People who play around trying to be cool making all different fonts and bold in post...argh!

 

I'm 35 and have difficulty with most jcink sites because of the small fonts most of them use. I also find most of them hard to navigate as well.

I don't like forums that haven't been modified from the default layout that they all come with, but I'd prefer that to most of the fancy, over-designed skins that I tend to come across lately.

 

Totally agree with you Ice. On the navigation, they are appalling. I really don't know why Jcink is so popular, for even as a free site, it is so amateur looking, like some nerdy kid designed it. That is one of the things I love about SMF, there are so many user made skins available for you to use and making your own is not a big task either. SMF1 the free version is almost as good.

 

I really hate the side-by-side forum layout that's become popular with CFS/HTML tables on jcink. It just doesn't look right to me at all.

Also, half the time the skin designers hide the last post date in the side by side forums, so if you want to see if the site is active you have to actually go into each forum and see when the last post was. :[

 

I have too many xD But here are some of my top least favorites!

- MS Paint text/pixelated graphics; please spend time on your graphics, it's not hard to do and there's plenty of free software you can use <3
- Times/Arial/otherwise super plain text in otherwise excellent graphics; c'mon guys, switch it up! <3
- Things that auto scroll for you (please no)
- Websites or forums that open 30 more tabs when one could have been perfect
- Too many GIFs!
- Coding that stretches/squishes images

 

Ho boyo. I agree with literally everything everyone's said, but also: fixed-height post templates. Every post should not have it's own scrollbar!! Same for forum rows/descriptions. You might not know, but mac scrollbars are invisible until you actually go to use them, so depending on where your paragraph breaks end up, I often have no way of even KNOWING there's more content than what's immediately visible.

 

I think an unorganized and cluttered site can make it hard for me to stay long on the website