It’s time for another bitch session. This time, various ‘popular’ websites on the Interwebs are my target.
Much as I could spend a lot of vitriol on them, I’m not going to spend time complaining about clickbait headlines (you won’t believe how much I hate them!); I’m not going to complain about those websites that make you read ten pages when one would do – simply to get eyeballs on ads; I’m not even going to complain about how ad saturated some pages are.
No, this time I want to discuss (i.e. complain about) websites that come off as desperate, needy and clingy.
I’ve lost count of how many websites will pop up a ‘window’ (within the canvas, rather than as a new window) that ask me to either subscribe to their email newsletter, or to Like them on Facebook. They do this before I’ve even had a chance to look at their site.
Pro Tip: If you annoy me before I can see your site, I’m not going to ‘like’ it.
In a similar vein, asking me to do a survey to ‘help improve your website’ is also stupid at this point.
Pro Tip: Try not to be stupid.
Then there are those websites that (usually poorly) try to detect that I’m leaving the page, closing the tab or similar, and beg me to look at other stuff they have. If they actually did do this only when I was going to close out the window or tab I might cut them some slack. Mostly they seem to do it if I switch tabs, move the cursor even vaguely near the ‘close’ icon or Alt-Tab away, then back again.
This just reeks of desperation (and/or poor programming). I won’t be back.
Pro Tip: I don’t do relationships like this, and I sure as hell won’t deal with websites like this.
Lastly (for this post) there are those that have not only gone down the ’10 pages instead of one’ route, but break up the reading by dropping you into a survey. The only good thing to say here is that most of these can be skipped. However, I’ve got so used to some websites holding the rest of the article hostage behind the survey that I just close the tab the moment one does this.
And that usually gives me a popup saying “before you leave …”.
Pro Tip: If you try to hold me hostage, I will do my best to escape. This means less ads in front of my eyeballs.
I’ve yet to come across a website that does all of the above, but I have so little faith in humanity that I’m pretty sure that if there isn’t one out there now, there will be soon.
Also. as an aside to web designers/programmers: which is worse?
- Killing the person that made you do this, and suffering a life behind bars, or
- Inflicting this shit on the world?
Discuss.
