I don’t understand why people think certain features make their Web pages better or more appealing, when all they really do is annoy the %$#^&* out of visitors.

I know I’m going to revisit this topic as soon as I come across another of those things that drive me crazy, but here are three.

1. Highlighting every search term you used to find the page. For example, if I Google “how do I change my oil,” there are some sites that will highlight every instance of each of those words, often in different colors. That makes it incredibly annoying to read. I get the idea, but there’s gotta be an off switch. (And I have no idea what Matt Roggott and Brian Suda were drinking when they wrote “Enhance Usability by Highlighting Search Terms” for A List Apart.)

2. Too many darned links. It makes sense to link to major terms, and certainly to Web pages that you reference, but some pages — I notice this frequently with news sites — link dozens of words even if they have nothing to with the story. Usually these are company names that link to the company home pages (not very useful) or stock price (ditto), but sometimes it’s worse. Some will links any term that corresponds to a section on the site. So every occurrence of the word “software” will link to the software category.

Wikipedia can get nuts like this too, with links to every conceivable page. “John Doe was the manager of a grocery store on a side street in downtown Atlanta during the opening weeks of World War II.” It’s one thing to link to significant entries, but to words that just have a definition (a la “week”)? Come on.

3. Gray body text. Why? Why? Are you trying to save ink by not using black? Does gray make the page more readable? No, in fact the opposite. Lower contrast just makes it harder to see. Is it a style thing? If so, it’s a stupid one.

4. Rollover ads. You know these things — highlighted text that pops up a small ad if you dare to accidentally roll your mouse over one. Companies pay to be linked to certain terms; maybe you would roll over the word “audio” and — bam! — up comes an ad for iTunes or whatever. Incredibly, incredibly annoying. Luckily there are Firefox extensions to shut that off, but still. Come on, guys.

More to come, I’m certain.

If you want to check out an awful, awful Web site, go to Adidas. Wow.

I saw an Adidas backpack that I wanted more info on, so I hit the site. I left without getting the info because the site was so bad.

• You can’t skip the opening Flash animation.
• The links are all but useless — “Originals” doesn’t tell me a damn thing. How about “Men’s shoes,” “Women’s shoes,” etc.?
• Every page is a Flash page that isn’t always quick to load. All I want is some info on one of your frakking backpacks!

Wake up, guys. People aren’t coming to your site to be dazzled. They’re coming to get product information. You wasted a ton of time and money creating a flashy site that prevents people from doing that.

Blech.

And yes, I’m messing with some new CSS features, such as popups when you hover over certain things. My plan is to use it for asides and footnotes, or maybe for quick definitionsLike this.

A little thanks, a few changes, some background, and some waxing technological.

First, thanks for all the suggestions; keep ‘em coming. I’ve taken many of them and considered all of them, all of which you should see reflected in the design now.

One thing I thought about is what people will see.

Some of you go to the home page (as would many new visitors), but many go straight to an entry, either through RSS, because of a Google search, or because of a direct link. So the individual entry pages had to act as pseudo home pages.

The real reason for the redesign is something you can’t see. The back end was a mess. There were five or six stylesheets, and I didn’t know how many of them were actually being used. There was a mix of old Movable Type entries and the newer WordPress ones, (Turns out WordPress had them all. Once I cleaned out the old MT stuff, everything switched to the new look, even the really old stuff.)

Even if there was only one stylesheet, the code was still a mess. I tweaked it so many times that some sections had two lines of code setting the font when it should have been <h3>.

So the back-end code is now cleaned up, and the pages have been simplified.

Getting a bit technical: I decided not to switch from using tables for the overall structure. I know purists think everything should be done with CSS, but frankly using tables is a lot simpler when you’re doing columns. So all the formatting is done in CSS, while the overall ’shape’ is done with a three-column table. It’s still a lot easier to work with and tweak.

Now it’s just a matter of making sure the design goes through to all the interior pages — the Contact page, for example, didn’t exist for a while. Now it does.

And that’s that. I’m sure to make more changes, but I’m vowing to keep it clean on the back end so when it’s time for the 2009 version, I’m all set.

Thanks for reading this far!