Website pet peeve!

[Dontworrybeappy]

Yep......if I open a page and hear music the page is immediately closed.......no exceptions.

Me too - HATE it! I have all sorts of ways to listen to good music if I want - having music on a website is like someone driving up beside you with their car window open and their choice of music blaring out! Thanks for sharing, but NO THANKS! :no:

 

[shminifancier]

Yes it is just not professional. period.

 

[Courtney]

Ugh. I'm going to look like such a snob here, but as a webdesigner, any websites with:

- music

- flashing .gif files

- animated cursors

- non-coordinated colors

- excessive ads

- huge pictures that take forever to load

... will have me closing the website. The first three are no-brainers. Don't include them. The fourth, I know some people just don't have a knack for matching colors, but for god's sake -- white background with yellow text is not pretty. Blue and pink doesn't match. Black and yellow is hard on the eyes. If you can't match colors, ask someone else to give you ideas.

Ads. If you're serious about your business, invest in a domain. That conveys professionalism. I often close Angelfire, Freewebs, or Geocities websites if I'm looking to purchase something.

As for the pictures, use thumbnails that will cut loading time in half, and give people the option to click and view huge pictures. Simple enough.

 

[kaykay]

i sooooo agree!! i really discourage anyone i make a site for NOT to use music. I had one customer insist on it so I did a 30 second loop instead of an ongoing file. So that was our compromise. And it did slow down the time for the home page to load if you were on dial up.

I always tell people NOT to use free sites such as homestead, angelfire etc. I absolutely will not stay on a site with popup ads!

And courtney is so right if you NEED to OWN your own domain name. Looks more professional and it gets you picked up by many more search engines.

another pet peeve of mine is people who own sites but use generic emails like [email protected] that looks so bad!

I even have customers I have made sites for that get free business email but still wont use it. Just makes no sense to me. For example my wesite is baxterspaintedpasture.com and my email is [email protected]

Looks way more professional in my opinion

 

[billiethekid40]

Totally agree! Especially since I usually have my own music playing on my computer and it sounds sooo bad to have the website music playing in the background... not to mention it often messes up my music playing and I have to restart the program. Save it for your "fun page" if you absolutely MUST have music.

 

[Sonya]

Music does slow me down...I'm only 26k...and I can tell a big difference when a site has music.

I can't even get satellite out here...too many trees...

 

[littledonkeys.com]

I agree on the free hosting, it never works, ads everywhere and a subdomain name isnt very good for search engines.

I got littledonkeys.com ranked #1 on MSN out of 140K pages for Miniature Donkeys in VA and ranked 32nc in the country in just 4 weeks.

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=mini...en-us&FORM=LVSP

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=mini...en-US&form=QBRE

The bad thing is the #1 ranked msn miniature donkey site did it with faulty html <title> codes

I could not have done that using a free hosting with dynamic IP's and no domain name

 

[Doobie]

I for one have music on my web page and have never had someone complain.

I think my website is very professional and am very proud of it.

As for not going on a site if it has music ... well I would go through music, pop ups, and more if that is what it takes to find the perfect horse !

 

[littledonkeys.com]

Even worse are the sites that play midis like gotdonkeys.com

Sounds like a $3 plastic keyboard from toys are us or a 1980's role playing video game...lol

 

[ForMyACDs]

I for one have music on my web page and have never had someone complain.

I think my website is very professional and am very proud of it.

Except for the music I would have to agree. I "braved" the music to see and yes, you do have a nice site. I still had to turn the music off as it was grating......

 

[Beccy]

Even worse are the sites that play midis like gotdonkeys.com

Sounds like a $3 plastic keyboard from toys are us or a 1980's role playing video game...lol

That's why a few of hours effort to find classy sounding midis and avoid the thousands of tinned music sounding ones, those horrible twangy things (which I also despise) is worth it. And as already mentioned, a small file on a loop which does not slow loading. I love my music and sometimes have my website on as the bg music while on the computer. I have had many compliments on the music on my site over the last few years. I want my site to reflect who I am and I love music. People have on off buttons on their speakers and can leave my site if it is such an incovenience to turn them off, no skin off my nose. I have seen several sites of well known farms that I personally think are just tacky and tasteless for various reasons, so I hardly think it is the sites that are selling the horses. I can understand leaving a site that gets up your nose, for me it is the pop up ads, but I can't shut a button off to deal with them!

I think it is unfair to say that a site is unprofessional because it has this that or the other thing, to each his own, and my taste is different from yours.

:

 

[Frankie]

Well, Music for me is ok,,,,,,,,,as long as it is ok music,,,,,,,that's why my speakers have an off knob.

Makes no difference to me what the email says, how it says it,,,,,,,,,just as long as if I use the email, it gets there!!!

I am not a fan at all of pop ups, but too understand why some need to use the free site and I will suffer through them if I am truly interested in viewing something on the site.

I hate all the dark pictures on some,,,the ones whose horses, all of them in pictures are always grazing with head down,,,,,,don't like all the blank space on some pages,,,,,,in other words, having a title and one picture,,,,,,,the viewer scrolls down for nothing.

And I do not like to view a page, go allll the way down the page, only to have to go allllllll the way back up again to find buttons to change pages.

But, it is all just my opinion. And what is good, professional to you, may not be to be or the next person.

If someone really wants to take a look at your site,,,,,,,,,they'll suffer through most times,,,,even if your professional is different than theirs.

 

[SunQuest]

You are talking to another dial up user here. Yes, there are MANY people on dialup still because they don't have a choice. In fact, my hubby and I are talking about moving. The areas we are looking at don't have cell phone service, and we would be doing good to have an old telephone line in which high speed access wouldn't work. Satellite would also be out of the question there as due to too many trees.

With that being said, I can't stand music on sites. The biggest reason is that I listen to music on my pc when surfing the net. And nothing worse than someone else's music playing with mine at the same time. YUCK!

Also, one must assume that in this day and age that there are other things that are used to view web pages with. PDA's (Palm pilots) and cell phones are just some of them. These gadgets don't necessarily have the power or ability to deal with music files. Again, I am talking from experience as I use my PDA to browse the internet.

Further, as a business, it is important to not inconvience to the customer. Saying that one can just turn down the speakers is not being thoughtful in the way one treats a potential customer, and in some cases like mine, would require me to get my fanny off of the chair to reach my speakers as I don't have a standard entry level speaker system connected to my pc. (It is a satellite sub woofer system and the speakers don't sit on my desk where I can reach them.)

As far as slowing the sites down and running tests to see if it does, most people can't tell how quick a site loads after the first time they were on the site. The reason is that the site information sits in the "cache" on their computer, especially if one was using the same computer to develope the site with. So one must clear out their computer by deleting all the temporary internet files to really tell when checking a site.

Remember, there are many things that slow down a web site and there are was to speed up loading a site even when there are a lot of pictures. One of the biggest ways to do this is to code the site in html without using a program to create the site. My site is an example of that. I coded it all by hand in a little program called Notepad. (I know, not everyone can do coding and it is very time consuming as well.) What happens is that the programs that create a site add all kinds of junk (aka comments) to the file. This all gets downloaded when one accesses the site. And midi files are also part of slowing things down as well and they do add to the wait.

But to each his/her own. The world would be a very boring place if we all liked the same things.

:

 

[Beccy]

You are talking to another dial up user here. Yes, there are MANY people on dialup still because they don't have a choice.

Further, as a business, it is important to not inconvience to the customer. Saying that one can just turn down the speakers is not being thoughtful in the way one treats a potential customer, and in some cases like mine, would require me to get my fanny off of the chair to reach my speakers as I don't have a standard entry level speaker system connected to my pc. (It is a satellite sub woofer system and the speakers don't sit on my desk where I can reach them.)

As far as slowing the sites down and running tests to see if it does, most people can't tell how quick a site loads after the first time they were on the site. The reason is that the site information sits in the "cache" on their computer, especially if one was using the same computer to develope the site with. So one must clear out their computer by deleting all the temporary internet files to really tell when checking a site.

Yep, we are on dial up too, no choice here either.

I have checked loading times form my son's and daughter's computers, and my midis made no difference, but resizing the photos did.

If someone thinks I am not being considerate of any potential customers because I think they should turn off the speakers if they don't like the music, then I guess I am inconsiderate. I can live with that because I like my site the way it is thank you!

 

[nootka]

I also dislike the music because of the cheese factor/sounding like the cheap synthesizer rather than the real version, and often it gets in the way of the music I am listening to. Now if you can host and play the actual song, that is fine, but even then, on a page designed for the sales and promotion of your product, please don't make me listen to your music, even if I like the music, I just don't find it professional, and it DOES sometimes crash my browser, though this is less frequent, it still happens, and I often surf from other computers where I notice the same tendency. I rarely go back to the site once that happens even though I know it's usually not the page's fault, but a software issue on my end.

I agree, if you want music, put it on your "fun" or "About us" page if you must, but leave it for MySpace or whereever, better yet.

Another thing I tend to turn off to are the dozens of little animations or images that have nothing to do with your farm or horses/you. For example, some sites have rows and rows of little borders, then a row of flashing stars or running horses, then more borders, some animated text, and it gets to be too much when every empty space is filled with something.

My site is far from perfect, and it does reflect my taste to some degree, but I try to leave off the slow-loading stuff, and the intrusive stuff.

And if you're doing this as a business or even as a hobby and want to be taken seriously, then lose the pop-up crippled free sites and get a good host that offers their sites with minimal intrusive advertising in return, or better yet, get your own w/none.

Liz M.

 

[Sterling]

I have to say I just checked out Doobie's web site and I really liked it. The music was not tacky sounding the way it's arranged and I guess also because I like the song (Keeper of the Stars) that made it moreso enjoyable. The website itself is very pretty. Good job!

 

[littledonkeys.com]

the only thing that makes ya site look busy is the tiled background, makes some of the font hard to see.