1. Incorrect Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation and General Sloppy Style

One of the things that annoy me when I go to a site is when someone can’t spell properly or even use correct grammar. Whilst I know everyone is prone to spelling mistakes I can accept that but I can’t stand it when there are obvious spelling mistakes everywhere and when people can’t even be bothered to add punctuation. How am I meant to know what you’re trying to put across if I struggle to understand the sentence? A little punctuation goes a long way. There are spell checkers these days too, both as an add-on in Firefox and Microsoft Word so the “well how am I supposed to know if it’s wrong” excuse doesn’t really cut it.
Grammar- whilst I know that too, to and two, where, were and wear and there, their and they’re may be confusing you could again use Microsoft word to check your grammar. It’s not always right but it’s better than going it alone if you’re not sure.

And finally: general sloppy style. What do I mean by this? Well typing like this:
OmG babiiiiiix-o ii lovee yooouu ii soooo type dat txt awesome!!!
Seriously?! That took me longer to type than normal text and it doesn’t even look good it makes no sense and when I see that I think not even gonna try and read that. And also text speak? Save it for texting or msn, I don’t like reading blogs full of u and m8 and gr8 and things like that. However I make exceptions for people whose English isn’t their mother tongue, because it’s damn hard translating into another language.

2. Browser Compatibility

Freewebs and Piczo owners are mostly the guilty party here. Quick reality check – NOT EVERYONE USES INTERNET EXPLORER! I for one stopped using IE a long time ago and switched to Firefox. So therefore when I browse sites I’ll see that the text is default and the tables are often squashed and overlapping and I can’t read a damn thing, yet they’ll be perfectly fine, in Internet Explorer.

If you’ve got other browsers downloaded on your system USE THEM! Make sure your CSS is valid and you can use this site to check how your site looks in different browsers » Browsershots

3. CSS

I really hate when people haven’t checked and formatted their CSS properly. For example line heights being smaller than the font size and ending up looking squished. Equally the text spacing. Yeah it might be cool to have -2px but when the words are all scrambled into one I can’t read that so I’ll probably not even bother.

Also having your main text less than 10px, sure I have 20:20 vision but it doesn’t mean I want to squint when I’m reading your super long blog about your super funny day you had with so and so. Ditto small fonts, yeah they were cool two years ago.

When you don’t change the colour of your textarea and the text inside so they end up being the same colour. How am I meant to comment if I can’t see what I’m typing.

And finally, changing the font/size for your link hover. Usually it means when I hover over a link it’ll spend 30 seconds freaking out as it decides whether it’s going to be one size or another.

4. Splash Pages

Why on earth do you have one? Unless its used as navigation for your portfolio or something it simply has no purpose except when I come along and see it and go why do I have to click an extra link when this page isn’t telling me anything new or interesting about the site.

5.Music

Many visitors like myself will probably:
a) Be listening to their own music already
b) Have lots of tabs open

So therefore when we visit we don’t want to suddenly be deafened with the newest chart song. It means then I have to turn off Itunes and go looking for the player to turn off this monstrosity. And although I’m pretty lucky to have super fast broadband, a lot of users don’t and it just slows your page loading time so people won’t bother waiting. Also if I have lots of tabs open, which I normally do as I bloghop a lot I’m going to be wondering which tab its even coming from and get annoyed very quickly.
Worse still if I decide to carry on visiting your site, every new page that loads, the music starts again!! And it quickly becomes boring having to turn the music off before I can even begin to look at your content. But, the most annoying thing about music, is if you’ve actually embedded it into the page and I can’t turn it off, I’ll be heading straight for the red “x”. Ditto videos that start automatically. I don’t mind ones that are optional to watch.