A Few Website Pet Peeves I Have

It’s time I get a few things off my chest when it comes to browsing the web. I love browsing through my feed reader to get a grasp on the various news stories surrounding WordPress and my favorite subjects and in the course of a few months, I’ve developed just a few pet peeves that really urk me. In no particular order, here they are and if you can help it, please avoid them!

Permalinks – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a great article only to discover that finding a simple URL to the post was a pain in the rear. When browsing posts in my feed reader, I typically see URLs filled with FeedBurners junk attached to them. Instead, I enjoy websites where the post title within the post acts as a permalink which is nice and clean for easy sharing.

Social Junk – Maybe I don’t get it, but I hate websites that have turned their comment section into a place to monitor social interaction. Instead of comments, I now see tweets, retweets, likes, etc. Everything is mixed together and it’s one big mess. Whatever happened to the days of seeing a great conversation take place within the comments section of a site and being able to easily participate in it? I salute those who have resisted the temptation to put that garbage within your comments section. However, I have no qualms of a smart comment form where reactions from specific services are tabbed based. For example, Comments Tab, Facebook Tab, Twitter Tab, etc. Having everything show up in the comment form is just a poor way to go about it.

I’ll Share It My Way – Of all the ways to share content, I’ve typically only used one method presented on a website and that was the old-fashioned, Email Story method. A long time ago, I used to hit the Digg button if it was displayed on the article I was reading but I haven’t had anything to do with Digg for a long time. Also, I’ve yet to read any articles of major websites providing an analysis of just how much their sharing buttons are used. Typically when I’m browsing through my feed reader, I have my preferred Twitter client opened so that if I find something interesting, I shorten the clean permalink and Tweet it, no buttons necessary. I’ll also send an email manually when I have Thunderbird open but I’ll look to see if the Email link is present within the article before I do that. If sharing buttons work for you to get more traffic, good on you but I tend to think that not many people use them.

WordPress.com Pop Up Links – While I don’t come across them all the time, those pop-ups that occur on various WordPress.com hosted sites are incredibly annoying. Not only that, but when you try to copy the URL, it adds that pop-ups URL stuff into it and in order to get the correct URL, you have to visit the linked site and grab it from there.

As for WPTavern.com, I’m sure some of you have the pet peeve that I don’t have any way to access the various categories that are written about on the site. It’s been like that for a while and I assure you, I’m looking into it. From playing around with the WordPress menu system, it doesn’t have an easy way to add a category drop down menu item to an existing menu. It’s either some categories, all categories, or nothing.

These are just a few of the pet peeves I have that get me all the time. Everyone has web site pet peeves so tell me, what’s yours?