Old Li2-Crystals

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Autoplay Music:

If you MUST have music on your site, then make the embeded player visible and let me click something to start it. You have no idea if I’m listening to something of my own, if I am, your site taking over my speakers and walking all over my Mozart concertos with your idea of what passes for music is just going to make me close that tab and never return. For that matter, you have no idea if my speakers are even turned on or not. There’s plenty of times when I leave them off which means your alleged music is just wasting bandwidth.

Autoplay Video:

This one is very much like the Autoplay Music only worse. Not only does playing video take up a lot of bandwidth, it also slows down the loading of the rest of the site. As with audio, if you MUST have video embeds on the site, make sure that the do not start until I click “play”. You don’t have any idea if maybe I’ve got another video going in another tab. If I want to watch your video, I’ll do so in my own time. This goes double if you have more than one video on a page. Few things are a bigger waste of time and resources than having multiple videos running at once.

“Popup” and / or “Popunder” ads:

I shouldn’t even have to mention these but I am because I *STILL* run into them. Here’s the deal, if you hit me with a “popup” when I load your page or leave a “popunder” as I leave your page, then I’m done with you. You’re wasing time, I’ll never click on anything in your popups/unders/whatevers. Also in this class is those “lightbox” style interstitials that are basically fancy reworked popups. I have the popup blocker in Firefox turned on FOR A REASON. If you manage to get one open anyway then you might feel good for forcing me to look at your advertisment but I’ll get even by not clicking on your advertisement. More to the point, I won’t come back.

Monster size headers:

If when I load your page, I have to scroll to see main content, you’re already on shaky ground. I look for at least *SOME* of the main content that I came there to see in the first place to be “above the fold”. For those who’re confused because you can’t fold a monitor, that means that the visitor should be able to start reading main content without any scrolling. I hate it when I have to scroll all over the place and *hunt* for content that’s hidden in a forest of advertising

Flash intros or other “landing pages”:

These things fall in the same category as Autoplay Video. They’re bigger than they need to be, use a lot of bandwidth and assume that I want to waste my time looking at a fancy intro when what I really want is the “meat” of your site/blog/whatever. Best advice, Don’t make visitors wait for an intro and don’t make them click any more than absolutely necessary to get to what they’re on your site for in the first place.

Slow graphics:

If you have to have a lot of graphics on your site PLEASE learn how to resize the images so that you’re not loading a monster full-screen image into a thumbnail sized graphic. Also, in spite of whatever design fad is current, it’s best to keep the number and size of images to a minimum. The less time and resources I spend loading your graphics, the more time I’m reading your content.

Hard to read Color / Font combinations:

I can’t emphasize this one enough. You might have the best site in the world with exactly the information I’m looking for but if I can’t read it without having to highlight it or magnify my browser’s font settings then it’s worthless.

When choosing color combinations bear in mind that subjecting your reader to eyestrain is NOT the way to get them to return or recommend your site. Color combinations need to have enough contrast to be easy to read without straining the eyes. Things like light to medium gray on a white or off-white background are VERY hard to read if your vision isn’t 20/20 and there’s no reason for it to be like that.

Font sizes are also another factor. If you actually WANT people to read your site then why not make it easy for them to do so? Keep the font sizes at 10-12 points (or higher). This combined with eye-friendly color combinations will make it easy for people to read your site.

Technorati Tags: advertising, web design, content, font size, bandwidth, video, readability, popup, audio, website design

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