Disturbing Things About Some Websites

Are we getting too fancy with our commercial websites? Is profit causing them to aggravate people who go on a website? It used to be a commercial website would be careful how they designed their site, because some things one might do to a site could cause customers or people who just want to browse so much grief they will avoid the site thus costing the company who owns the site to lose money. Things seem to have changed. The entire philosophy of commercial website is changing. It seems to include packing in as many commercials as one can. This would normally drive people away, but so many other websites are doing this, soon there will be nowhere to go which doesn’t do this. I was on a website the other day which will remain nameless. It combined just about everything I hate while browsing and it was a rather famous website. This made me decide to write an article about some of the things I hate which some websites do.

I have to wonder how many of us go to what we think is an interesting website and begin to read the text and then it happens, an audio starts running advertising something. We may have our audio volume up a little high not expecting this, which makes matters even worse. We begin to examine the page we are looking at with the intention of turning the audio off so we can get back to reading, so we carefully check the page for anything which is running so we can turn it off. After a minute or so we realize there is nothing to turn off and if we want to continue to read the page without the annoying sound we have to go to the computer’s audio control and turn off the sound there. We should never have to do this. Not only is it rude, it is analogous with what used to happen when one downloaded a piece of software and a certain anti-virus program you didn’t want also got installed and there was no way to get rid of it except by going to that company’s site and downloading a special program to erase it. It just shows no regard for us.

Another peeve I have is when I go to a site and a video opens up advertising some product. One site I went to had several of these and as I would turn one off, a few seconds later another would start. I had to figure the owner of the site was paid by how many of these videos ran while someone was on his or her site. They must have been paid by the click which some advertisers do. If one is interested in a story and begins to read it and a video starts it is very annoying, especially with this just continues. You can bet this website will never be visited by me again. I can understand why these sites advertise, but this is not the way to do it. It also seems like the site was just a trap to get in as many click as possible and was really not offering anything worthwhile.

How many of us have clicked on a link to a website only to be taken to some advertisement and not the site we wanted to go to? Then most of us go back to the page that did this thinking we clicked on the wrong link and try and find the correct one which may or may not exist. Sometimes the main page has so many different links it is hard to figure out which link will take us where we want to go. Other times highlighted links which say download under them or have arrows or some such think trying to get us to click on them are totally confusing. It seems to me the main reason for all this confusion is to get us to some advertisement whether it be a video or different advertising page and the page which attracted us may not even exist. This seems to be underhanded to me and it is something you will never see on Aboutfacts.org. There are also some sites which take you to a page which has a “continue to selected page” or something like that. I don’t mind this too much, but still think it is wrong and a way of forcing us to read some advertising before getting to where we want to go.

Did you ever want to watch a video? I am not talking about a commercial video, just some video someone made, perhaps the video of a UFO event and there is a long advertisement at the beginning? It seems more videos are doing this than ever. Some of these videos don’t allow fast forward so if you want to see the video you have to either sit through the commercial or leave.

One thing which annoys me is when I get to a page and the text is surrounded by ads. The type is small so I may decide to enlarge the page, but when I do the ads cover the text I am trying to read. This seems to me to be very poor website creation. The reason I say this is who would settle for only being able to read the ads? The average person would either decide to squint and leave things alone or leave in disgust. Then there are the sites which let you on and just when you are starting to look at something a survey comes up. Okay I can live with that if there is a way of closing it if I don’t want to take it, but there are too many sites which put up adverts or surveys which there is no way of closing. This is just poor taste. How many of us have decided to never go to these sites again?

I believe a site can be friendly and still advertise. Forcing adverts on someone will not endear the site to them. A tasteful advertisement on the side or top of the page doesn’t seem to offend anyone. We all know these sites need to make money to survive. About Facts hasn’t advertised yet, but it is not a commercial site. As technology advances I am sure there will be a lot more distasteful advertising going on. It has come to the point when one goes on a website it sometimes knows your tastes and puts up advertisements which you are more likely to be interested in. Yahoo is famous for this. Now that all our movements are known it is getting easier for large site owners to track our movement and post ads for things we have browsed before. The future is here and advertising has a lot to do with it.