DQ on Web Sites that Irritate Her

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Web Sites that Irritate Me

(I am writing this to explain a comment that was on my Links page, though I thought I'd attach it to my rants page as well.)I am a very boring, purist kind of web surfer. I like pages that load quickly and I do not like colors or other things that hurt my eyes, like blinky crap. Graphics are nice, but they better be small, at least on the menu pages. I don't want fancy plug-in requiring crap and blinky crap and stuff when I'm just trying to find out a simple piece of information.

I hate it when I go to a site and I'm sitting there, watching the page load. There are a billion little "image still loading" symbols and no text–not even "alt" messages to let you know what the images are that are taking so damn long to loard. A quicktime recording of a bad midi that I don't want to listen to is loading, making the process even longer. Five minutes pass, and I get the first few glimpses that I have actually come to the page I was looking for.

Here's the deal: sounds and animations and big fancy graphics are well and good, but have a place, and that place is not the main page of a website. All I want when I go to the first screen of a website is something that tells me where I am and what information I can get from that site. A small graphic or two and some nice, sane use of color is always a bonus, as long as it enhancesthe layout, not detracts from it.

A menu on the main page may say something like: "Big Fancy Images This Way." That way, if I want to take the time to look at the big fancy images, I have a choice in doing it. If I'm not given the choice, I usually click "stop loading" and search for a web site that doesn't irritate me as much.

I know my page is probably too minimalist for some people. I'm not saying everyone's page should be like mine–a grad student in English with only basic knowledge of HTML and a bootlegged graphics editor–all I'm saying is give me a page that's not a pain in the ass and eyes to read.

Thank you for your time.