How to Annoy Your Website Visitors

By: Deanna Lilly

1.  Start with an entry page that includes a huge graphical logo, lots of flash animation or background music files that take centuries to load. Don’t include any information about your company on the entry page. Why bother, the graphics are entertaining.  A little pizazz is fine these days with faster internet speeds most phones, tablets, and home networks can handle the load.
   
2.  Put lots of animated graphics on every page and lots of photos or images that you created yourself but didn’t bother to optimize for web loading. Fool everyone by making thumbnails out of them by shrinking them so the look smaller.  Images should always be optimized for the web so they load fast.  Images straight out of the camera are usually 300 dpi, and about 4500 x 3500 pixels, achieving about 4-6 MB.  Images for the web (or for PDF’s that you are going to use on the web, should be no bigger than 73 dpi, and 1100 x 900 pixels – a good standard for blog posts is 800 x 600 or 800 x 450 (pick one and use it for all.
   
3.  Use the smallest font size available and make it a serif font like Times New Roman. Who cares about the eyesight of the visitor anyway? Better yet, use brightly colored background and opposite color text for maximum glare.  Use at least 14pt font size for today’s themes.
   
4.  Use low contrast color combinations like yellow on white, or better yet, dark gray on black so your readers really have to concentrate to see what you’ve put on the page. After all, you’re an expert in my field, they can’t get this information elsewhere in an easier to read format.  Make sure your colors are pleasing and “fit” together in a pleasing manner.
   
5.  WRITE EVERYTHING IN CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE, LIKE SHOUTING, IT CREATES A BIGGER IMPACT ON YOUR READERS.
   
6.  EXPERIMENT WITH switching between CASES FOR absolutely NO REASON, preferably EVEN IN THE midDLE of WOrds.  Won’t that call attention to what you have to say?  [This is called the P.T. Barnum Method.]
7.  Make every paragraph a different color text. That helps call attention to each paragraph. Remember your website is like a circus, and you are the ring leader, shout it out in any way you can. They won’t get frustrated and tired of all the variation.
   
8.  Make sure absolutely every page positively requires horizontal scrolling [left-right].  People are used to scrolling up and down so why not entertain them with additional left and right scrolling too?
   .
9. DON’T WORRY ABOUT MOBILE FRIENDLY VIEWING.  Who cares if it doesn’t resize for phones and tablets.  They can just scroll left, right, up and down, till they find stuff.
   
10.  Frames can be a powerful technology. Be sure to use them heavily, and don’t let users easily break out even when leaving your site. For extra credit, combine this with horizontal scrolling and have the ‘Home’ button “accidentally” put the entire frame-set inside the smallest frame.
    
11. Forms are most interesting when they don’t work at all. Unfortunately, it won’t waste much of your visitors’ time if the form has only a couple of fields. Therefore make sure your form has at least 20 fields which must be filled out exactly right – by all means don’t tell them how they need to enter phone numbers or credit card numbers… let them guess if they need the dashes between numbers… then surprise them when the hit the submit button that wipes out everything they’ve already entered so rather than correcting only those fields that are wrong, they have to start over. They love it. They have all the time in the world to play around in your forms.
    
12. Banners advertising is a terrific way to help pay for your website. Why use one or two when 20 would get more attention? Remember never use a text link when you have a chance to use a banner.
    
13. Sadly, some web hosting companies do not add pop-ups to your pages. If your web host is holding you back in this way, don’t despair. After you’ve mailed your letter of compliant to the hosting company, add a little JavaScript with lots of pop-ups to your pages to achieve the same effect.
    
14. The old ideas are often still the best ones: Bad English is well-known technique that many webmasters are familiar with – just throw up your content however it’s written. Don’t use headers and sub headers between subjects. Be sure to include a sufficient number of speling misteaks in all your text, or for a really exciting twist make your sentences really long, with way too many clauses, a super abundance of overlong and unnecessarily obtuse terminology and gratuitous jargon, and unexpected changes from formal language into the a more colloquial style.
    
15. Use a gazillion exclamation points because they are way cool and then people know it’s supposed to be a really big point you are trying to get across because your text didn’t exactly make the point.  [Like smiley faces and canned laughter tell us when to laugh because obviously we aren’t smart enough to know what’s funny.]  Oh, and exclamations points also read like a number one or lowercase “L” on browsers so it keeps people guessing about your spe!!ing.
    
16. Set up pop-ups  ON EVERY PAGE to ask people to bookmark your site or make your site their home page. They will love you for it.  Why wouldn’t every first-time visitor wants your site as their home page?