Website design rant incoming...

BowdonUK

BowdonUK

BowdonUK

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Some of the design decisions of popular websites really make the user experience unfriendly.

From sites rammed full of advertisements (and they wonder why people use ad blockers!), to links not easily accessible, news items with no dates, no authorship of the article, no links to show the article source etc.

It is amazing that we've had at least 20 years of solid mainstream websites design and major sites, usually those reporting news media, get it so wrong.

If a news item has no date on then how do I know if it's current or old news?

Ok rant over :(
 

englishpremier

englishpremier

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Worse for me is then you are greeted with a big GDPR banner that you can't just click "reject all" on.

First you have to deal with that. Then you'll get a request to allow notifications. No.

Then you'll get a subscribe to our newsletter pop up.

Then just when you think you can access the content you actually came to the website for, you get a video ad automatically playing.

Tomshardware (the whole publishing company that owns it) is terrible for this.

MCN is another.
 

arknor

arknor

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most sites seem to be advert farms with mass articles written by AI.

Youtube seem to be headed the same way, albeit at a much slower pace.


Even the big national newspapers, a lot of the articles must be written by interns, or AI models are picking up really bad spelling habits.

I'm guessing the later and no one bothers to proof read them because the actual articles don't matter.

most websites viewers are like fish trapped in a net.


actually even youtube went that way thinking about it, most channels are just pumping out garbage because putting in effort is little reward when you already have a big viewership.
I think someone even made a video about it? pretty sure I remember watching one.
 
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Drollic

Drollic

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I'm nominating eBay as the worst given the scale of it. Take a basic website design from the late 90's, then bolt on so many different things, you don't even know what you're adding any more and where it should feature. It's websites within websites within other websites - inception style buying/selling.
 
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Diddums

Diddums

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englishpremier said:
Worse for me is then you are greeted with a big GDPR banner that you can't just click "reject all" on.

First you have to deal with that. Then you'll get a request to allow notifications. No.

Then you'll get a subscribe to our newsletter pop up.

Then just when you think you can access the content you actually came to the website for, you get a video ad automatically playing.

Tomshardware (the whole publishing company that owns it) is terrible for this.

MCN is another.
Click to expand...

Also when you press back on your phone and it takes you to a load of links "before you go" or some rubbish.

Get in the sea.
 

On Holiday

On Holiday

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Hiding dates on news or blog posts is a bit of SEO black magic. Search engines tend to favour pages that are updated, so will often find questionable news "outlets" (think *** bible) going back and adding a paragraph or so each time to their articles and re-posting them.
 
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dowie

dowie

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Baldbloke said:
I will not go on any newspapers websites. They are horrendous with pop ups, ads and pushing stuff in your face. They are an absolute nightmare. I avoid them at all costs.
Click to expand...

They're the worst offenders... Also if you've put off updating your phone for just a year or two they seem to sometimes either cause it to massively overheat or simply crash the browser. Other buggy features on mobile include sitting through a 30 second advert in order to watch some news related clip and then the clip itself doesn't play because the site is just useless on mobile.

Plus when they bombard you with adverts and some of them obscure the screen you can't read the story without clicking X to close them but the X is ridiculously small and can easily lead to mis-clicking on the advert which then goes to some random product page.

Worse they've so badly designed the advert placement that the advert taking up 1/3 of the screen is some google advert and clicking to try and get rid of it just causes the same space to be taken up with stuff about ad preferences/don't show me ads of this type any more etc..etc.. instead of just making the stupid box blocking the story just go away.


Lastly, websites that require cookies, I'd rather most of them didn't and so got rid of the stupid pop-up. Like tfl journey planner is often used when on trains or on the way to stations... even if you've previously clicked to accept cookies (and haven't deleted cookies ever) it seems to periodically make you click the same pop-up again when opening to site, especially annoying if you're on a train with a bad signal or on the way to a station, very easy to misclick on that site on mobile too and get taken to some info page etc. when all you want is the user interface to enter your station from and to.
 

dowie

dowie

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I think I want a second mobile browser that's just for browsing... that literally just acts like a basic browser from a few years ago.

Requirements:

  • Auto accept cookies/close the pop up.
  • Kill any advertising pop ups.
  • Don't open reddit app when clicking on reddit link
  • Don't open news app when clicking on a news link
  • Don't open Bloomberg app when clicking on a Bloomberg link
  • Basically don't open anything or show any additional layers on top of the actual site I clicked to open from google.

If I wanted to open an app I'd open a ****ing app, half the time the news app then says I need an Apple News subscription but the article is either completely open on the browser or counts as one of X free articles that month.

I fully appreciate that free news needs to be supported by advertising and I'm happy to accept adverts on the page (think it's unethical to block those) but GTFO with any pop ups that steal focus or obscure things... I want that nonsense to either be auto-accepted or suppressed.

I don't need care about cookies etc.. on such an browser as I'm not intending to use it to log into any email, or social media or do any shopping, I simply want an app for the sole use of browsing and reading the web with ease where I can click on a link and read the information contained within that webpage... like how the web was supposed to be, just kill any attempt to open a new app or display pop-ups.
 
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