Andrew Gormley

It seems near-impossible, in this day and age of Web 2.0, that some designers still don’t fully grasp the most basic forms of usability; ways to make a website work for the visitor rather than against them.  Here are 10 great ways that you too can completely disregard and frustrate your visitor.

1. When people reach your URL, you’re going to want to have a splash page featuring an obscure graphic or (preferably) a giant Flash file with a ridiculously slow progress bar. If at all possible, techno music should be playing during this experience and the only meaningful information you should have is a dim, barely visible “Enter” button to reach the “real” website.
2. To add insult to injury, you’re going to want the aforementioned splash page to resize the user’s browser without asking (go fullscreen whenever possible).  Never mind the fact that they might be up to meaningful work or have their browser set just right to accommodate tabs they use regularly. None of this is important because it’s YOUR site, not theirs.
3. Whenever possible, always opt for the cheaper route and host your site on Angelfire or Geocities. Since most users still use dial-up, they won’t notice your site choking for bandwidth.  When selecting which banner option you’d like to use in exchange for free hosting, call and let them know you’d like them all on there: the popup, the horizontal banner across the top, and the square banner in the navigation.  Insist that it’s your way of thanking them for “hooking you up”.
4. You’re going to want to use low-contrast combinations of colors whenever humanly possible. Try white text (#ffffff) on a light gray (#cccccc) background as a good example.
5. If a user is running Internet Explorer, require a few plugins to be installed.  If a user is running anything else, require an ActiveX control for the site to continue loading AND a few plugins to be installed. Serves them right for not viewing the site in you browser of choice.
6. A good domain name can make or break a site, which is why you should make it your prerogative to select one that’s either 1) confusing to spell or 2) is a double entendre.  An example of each, respectively is as follows: dash-hyphen-dot.com, actual site Experts Exchange has a great domain at www.expertsexchange.com
7. Some sites are thin, some are wide, but very few ever take advantage of the horizontal scrollbars.  Make every effort to have your site scroll in both directions so you can fit the absolute maximum amount of content on a page.  A good way to do this is to design for monitors with a resolution of 2560×1600 resolution as your baseline.
8. I cannot stress this next one enough: FRAMES! FRAMES! FRAMES!  Use as many frames as possible to make your site look as though it takes advantage of new-fangled technologies like AJAX.  One frame should be entirely dedicated to embedding your MySpace page.
9. Contrary to long-established beliefs, animated GIFs are still a really fantastic technology. Some people use them sparingly across a page, perhaps to draw the eye, but this is a mistake.  GIFs should almost always function as the background of the page for maximum effect. Example.
10. Who reads anymore?  The bulk of your content should be in YouTube Video form and embedded multiple times across your site to drive the point home.  Your About Me section can be a retrospective of your life starting with embarrassing home videos of you as a child all the way up to last weekend when you passed out in a shopping cart from one too many shots of tequila. Set them to autoplay simultaneously whenever given the option.