4 min read
Shit your website does
Never mind that these things should not exist in the first place, just put some copy in the footer saying, "if you browse this website, you're agreeing with our cookie policy. To opt-out, leave."
Nobody wants to click through hundreds of "legitimate interest" checkboxes before realising there was a low-contrast "deselect all" right at the bottom of the damned dialog.
Despite deprecation, it works everywhere except in Safari which incorporates proprietary anti-tracking from Apple.
Since it still exists - and since a user can still manually set it - not performing the utterly trivial check and acting on it (like for example, not bothering to show a cookie-notice in the first place) just makes you a dick.
Browsers already have share buttons. And bookmark managers, address-bars, and a means to copy and paste from them.
If you insist on doing this, just provide a "copy to clipboard" button, and don't "prefill" your link with a load of tracking parameter bloat. The link should be a link to your thing, not your crappy stats-tracker, url-shortener, or social-media integration.
Fight link rot.
You are NOT protecting yourself from copyright infringement. Once it's on the Internet, it's on the Internet forever. If you don't want that, don't upload it.
Anyone with an ounce of motivation can copy your stuff. They can disable JavaScript after your page-loads, use the devtools to download your assets, or inspect their browser cache from a file-manager or dedicated tool.
All you're doing by disabling right-click is inconveniencing the vanishingly few readers who actually give a crap about what you're up to, and causing a few others to download your stuff out of spite.
Unless you're hosting a heavy weight content-creation app that justifies a custom menu because of its vast array of actions, don't intefere with the expected behaviour of the users' browser.
You're probably not Figma, so don't do it.
# Tasteless scroll-hijacking
No, you're not Apple, and even they struggle to make scroll-hijacking work decently.
One of the most bizarre scroll-hijacks I've seen changed both the inertia and sensitivity of the default scroll behaviour. Nothing else. No fancy parallax, no transitions. The author just wanted to fuck with other peoples browsers.
Another offending website hijacked vertical-scrolling in order to scroll their own content horizontally.
Needless to say, in both cases the content was not compelling enough to put up with this flagrantly shitty UX choice. Is yours?
You know, those ones that seem to appear when your mouse looks like it's zooming its way to the top of the browser window?
No offense, but the reader has decided your thing isn't what they're looking for. No need to give them the website equivalent of the "middle-finger" just before they decide to close your tab.
Your newsletter signup goes in the footer, where it will be seen if you've earned the chance for it to be seen.
# Prolific internal keyword citations
Your news rag is not an encyclopedia.
Example: An article on the "Demographics of India" and the word "India" is hyperlinked to your own internal search-page revealing more of your own articles about India.
The problem is context: The impression given is that the link leads to an external source that corroborates the article being read. But the reader is instead presented with a search-page of articles from the same site that don't relate at all to the subject matter, except tangentially.
The motivation is one of "SEO" link-farming and the desire to hold the eyeballs of readers for a few moments more for the sake of advertising dollars.
Respect your readers. SEO optimisation is NOT UX optimisation. A better solution would be to have a footnotes section containing links to both your own internal articles as well as external citations, making clear which is which.
# Prominent videos that have nothing to do with the article
You know that video you put right under the article header?
Right under the header that says "Watch this video of the thing"?
The one that plays something completely unrelated to what the article invited you to see in the first place?
The one that you posted more prominently than the actual thing which, if it exists at all, is buried waaaay down the page behind 30 seconds of unskippable adverts?
Well, thanks for providing Google search-terms to find the video elsewhere.
# What makes you think your own website is so great anyhow?
I don't.
21 Sep, 2023