Cyber Obliviots

I wonder if the majority of website designers ever test their websites? I am always floored at the number of user unfriendly websites. Do you have any bugbears? Here are some of mine.

- videos that start playing when you click on links. This drives me batty. I wish that they would load, but not play. Sometimes I am surfing while Marc is asleep next to me and I don't want to wake him.
- links that download when you click on them without giving you notice that this is a link to a download.
- sites that don't give you the parameters for usernames and passwords. I've just been at a website and this is how registration went. I typed in a user name and password and received an error message that said the user name needed at least one uppercase letter so I retyped it with the first letter capitalized. Then I received another message saying that I couldn't use special characters. I fixed that and then received another message saying that it needed to include numbers. I fixed that thinking I had covered all my bases only to find out that I had a message about the password. Same deal with the password. Wouldn't it just have been easier to write the list of requirements for both items on the same page you start the registration process?
- American websites that have the drop down menus for "country" that has the US all the way at the bottom of the list.
- flash intro's. I just want the info, not all the crap.
- short webpages. The Mayo Clinic is a good example of what I am talking about. You go there to look up a disease and instead of having a single webpage that you can scroll down, it has multiple short pages so you end up waiting for pages to load all the time.
- background music, especially cheezey background music. The other day I went to a website to look at Passover vacations and then started watching a movie. it took me five minutes to work out why an Inspector Lynley movie was playing Israeli music. LOL. OK I'm the obliviot here, but the website only started playing the music after I left it. I suppose that this is a lesson to me to stop leaving so many windows open. It drives Marc crazy that I have a zillion windows open at any one time.