Profile of the Most Annoying Site on the Web

What is the most annoying website on the web like? Well, there are a couple of satirical attempts to be the most annoying (view at your own risk), but they’re just trying to be funny (in an odd sort of way), but they’re not realistic.

In my opinion, the most annoying real website ever

  • Always resizes your browser to exactly 120% of your screen resolution.
  • Launches three pop-up ads on page load.
  • Has a black background (or distracting tiled picture) with bright yellow text.
  • Has at least two animated banner ads that say “click this ad for a free iPod!” through your speakers.
  • Opens external links in new windows.
  • Has horrible navigation.
  • Has little design whatsoever.
  • Makes you register to leave a comment. During the registration, you have to confirm your account via email, and say “no” to the 23 mailing lists you would otherwise be subscribed to.
  • Says “best viewed in Internet Explorer” at the top of the page, and does not work well in any other (more standards-compliant) browser.
  • Takes two minutes to load at 780k/sec.
  • Plays music on page load.
  • Has so many typos and grammatical errors it’s impossible to understand anything.
  • Copies and pastes entire content from other sites instead of linking.
  • Is stingy with links, and uses nofollow (or JavaScript onClick) to avoid passing any PageRank.
  • Offers an email subscription, but not RSS, and assumes that you would still want to subscribe after seeing their site.
  • Opens more pop-ups when you leave.

I spent half an hour in Photoshop making the image you see above. I’d say it looks sufficiently annoying. :D

  • http://www.ruelicke.net/ Marco Ruelicke.net

    you forgot the “uses Comic Sans” in you list, but I can see you have it in your “great” design image. Usually those websites also have a visitor counter and are up to date with a “last update: 12 months ago”.

    Maybe you could add some 1337 speak? ;)

    Fortunately those websites don’t rank well and actually the last time I saw such a page was…uh…a long time ago.

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    It’s by no means a definitive list. :D There are plenty more things that could irritate the heck out of anyone.

  • http://www.ruelicke.net/ Marco Ruelicke.net

    so true, just thinking about the “good” ol’ days of the Internet…so far I experienced those that is…

    I somehow got the urge to create a live version of such a “perfect” website.

    Do you mind if I steal some ideas of your image? Of course you will get full credit once the page goes live.

    P.S.: I believe I got an idea for the podcast pilot episode. Will twitter you a message…
    P.P.S.: Your line breaks are still not working properly with NicEdit

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    Go ahead with your live version. :D

    I haven’t had time to fix the linebreak issue, so it makes sense that they’re not working right. :D

  • http://www.gensantos.com/ bariles

    oh god! am guilty of “opens external links” in new windows.  will take note of this.  thanks so much.

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    Opening external links in new windows doesn’t universally annoy everyone. It tends to bug a lot of people though for several reasons.
    1. Experienced users tend to prefer opening new tabs when they need them, instead of having extra windows open without any choice
    2. Newbies have a tendency to not notice that a new window opened, and then wonder why the back button no longer goes back.
    Personally I don’t normally care either way. I have Firefox open target=”_blank” links in new tabs instead, which saves me from a lot of the annoyance (and I drag links to the URL bar if I want to force it to open in the same tab). Some people won’t like it though.