Sunday Seven on Monday

My entertainment yesterday was Everett on Facebook, quizzing us all day long on Van Halen lyrics. (Shows how exciting my Sunday was, eh?) He saw them in Houston last night with his son. All I could think of was him and the rest of the guys at lunch in high school, in their parachute pants and bandanas, singing along to VH on the jukebox. Good times!

A jukebox in the cafeteria. Sounds like I went to high school in the 50's. Or on the set of Grease. I think it was our sophomore year that they put the thing in there. It was a brilliant idea, a total money-maker.

Patrick's Sunday Seven

I found a list at 12Most.com of the 12 Ways to Turn Off Web Visitors and thought it’d make a great question.

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Name seven ways a website is most likely to turn you off on a first visit.

1. A Flash splash page. All those moving parts coming together... waaaaaay too slowly... while I wait for a sliver of navigation or some sort of option to exit the Flash version of the site altogether. The webmaster assuming I give a flying fig about his artistic "welcome" to the site. Just take me to the information. Thanks.

2. Forced video. If you must have a video on a page, never have it autoplay. This is almost always the way I (and everyone around me) discover I've accidentally left my speakers on max volume.

3. Music. See #2.

4. Pop-ups. I don't see many pop-up ads, maybe because of the adblocking software I have, or maybe because they are out of fashion these days, or perhaps because I'm never rarely looking at anything pornographic. But I do see tons of "HI!!! Wanna make this site better/faster? Maybe give us your email address? How about taking a survey?" No. Goodbye. I also despise pop up chat windows that appear while I shop or look for information. Place a "Live Chat" icon somewhere on the page and I promise I will find it if I need it.

5. Unprofessional appearance. This is usually indicated by tragic color choices, large, obnoxious fonts and animated gifs.

6. Mystery meat navigation. This term was coined by the way cool Web Pages That Suck site. (Spend some time there today! So entertaining.) I hate when I'm looking for... say... contact info on a site, and I am given navigation icons of a pig, a radiation symbol, a cheerleader and a beach ball.

7. Visual information, no text. This seems to be the way of things- show people answers to their questions so they don't have to do all that pesky reading. Some information is perfect to show via a photo, video or infographic. Most of the time, though, I want a written story to accompany it. If I'm looking for the score to the big game, I don't want to have to watch a video of the news report to find out.