Intro
I recently Asked a question in the Linkedin Q&A Forums to help me understand mistakes to avoid when building my website. It is important to seek opinions and accept critique… No person is indispensable… we all need help along the way to refine and improve what we do…
I encourage you… trying to establish yourself as a blogger, independent publisher, social networker or whatever is that you do online… to participate in debates, engage market professionals, Join a Q&A discussion in various social networking sites. Remember… “What you are doing, someone else has tried before” So… by asking you learn to avoid the same mistakes other before you made or mistakes others see in the industry… With an open mind and willingness to accept negative and positive criticism more people are bound to read your online content.
I extended the Q&A more than once to obtain a good poll sampling… But I am interested if anyone… a Mathematician can use the stats to below to create like pie-chart or graph to share with the readers.
The people have spoken below and in great lengths below… I look at it as an opportunity to improve in online publishing… to be successful as an independent publisher with a good following… Striving to make the online content reading the best and seamless.
Intro by
Jeff Makana
Chief Editor
What annoys you the most when reading online content?
What would you like in your RSS feeds?
New media trends: I am doing a survey on Independent new media web2.0 technologies
What would you like in your RSS feeds?
Would it be easier for a web based tool to select news for you on the go, based on your reading pattern,and/or sites visited(or other pre-set sites)?
What annoys you the most when reading online content? What else would you like to see(on the same screen) while you read your favorite blog?
Would you like site control to turn-off ads displayed?
Your responses will be shared here? And the stats will be OpenSource?
Send responses to
jachep@gmail.com or fill the form below…..
cforms contact form by delicious:days
Responses from around the web2.0 technology users… The best minds in the game.
Pieter Dorsman
Manager Product Marketing
“What annoys me most when I read online content, are backgrounds and color schemes that make the text unreadable to me, because I have a problem with contrast.
Pop-ups are annoying, but even more so the temporary (ad or info)overlays that you sometimes see now when you are trying to read an article. Actionscript/flash video’s (mostly with companies) that cannot be closed easily and immediately.
Ads in side bars don’t annoy me much .”
Nathan Biles
Founder & President of Biles Online Web Development
“I really don’t like reading online unless it is necessary.
I perfer bullets, pictures, and videos.
What I hate about reading on the internet is that the writers write as if they are writing a book. Writing for the internet you need to be short, sweet, and to the point.
And we can’t forget about the “artistic sites” that you can’t read the text at all because of their choice of colors…. http://w3schools.com/quality/quality_readability.asp ”
Links:
Ethan OToole
Systems Engineer at Centric CRM
“One thing that really turns me off are the animated “pop-over” advertisements. Some of them hang around for a bit, some of them are triggered by mousing over… In either case, I dislike them.
I have to agree that hard to read sites are a pain, but most mainstream websites use color schemes that don’t pose a problem.”
Sheilah Etheridge
Owner, SME Management: Management and Accounting Consultant
“I don’t like sites are are too busy, too many colors or ads. I dislike flyouts and pop ups as well. And I seriously dislike sites that contain voice messages.”
Sheila
Lori Reed
Learning and Development Facilitator
“I like for my RSS feeds to have full-text. I hate reading a piece of a post and then having to click to read the rest of the article. I rarely go to sites for information. For me RSS is preferred over the actual site. Most of the people I work with design their sites specifically for RSS feeds.
This tells me that content is key. If you don’t have anything of interest to me, I will not keep the RSS subscription. So it really no longer matters what a site looks like. I’m only going to see it one time. Make it neat, clean, and easy to navigate.
What annoys me most is poor writing–too many typos, writing without a purpose, having a hidden agenda.
I’ve gotten to the point where I do not notice most ads. However when ads start coming in to my news reader then I will drop a site in an instant!”
Lori Reed
I.C. Jackson
Proofreader/Editor/Ghostwriter, Jackson Proofreading and Editing
“I am annoyed by unclear, poorly written content.
Misspelled words and improper grammar usage (except in select creative and informal works) are also a pet peeve.”
I.C. Jackson
Links:
Steve Hutchinson
Senior Enterprise Architect at Coventry Health Care
“I echo the preference for RSS feeds over surfing and also the importance of delivering full feeds instead of tiny blips that more and more often are meant to take me to an ad-laden website.
Content is king and well-written articles about a subject that the author has expertise in and passion about will keep me subscribed. I’ll sample a huge number of feeds but only keep the few that offer truly engaging content.
One of the easiest ways to lose my subscription is to post poorly-written articles with grammatical errors and misspellings.
Some people complain about articles or events that get cross-posted to a number of subscribed blogs. While I usually won’t read the article again, I do like that cross-posting provides an avenue to locate new feed sources in the topic area. There are a number of blogs I subscribe to that I found through references from established blogs.”
Vijay Raghavan
Manager - Software Development, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Atlanta
“I’m on my blackberry most of the time. My wife calls it an extra body part on my body. Anyway,I read most of my content on that small screen. So I would like for all sites to have a mobile version of the same content so that I don’t have to wait for graphics to load etc. The faster the site loads the more people would be interested in reading the content. I’m sure there are many more Blackberry junkies out there who would agree with me.”
Mike Hillyer
Sales Engineer, Author, Public Speaker
“My Greatest annoyance is paging of articles. When I read an article online I want it all on one page. I don’t want to hit next page twelve times.
It is more annoying when it it obviously an attempt for more clicks and more ad exposures. On such sites I usually reach for the printable format version and read that instead since it usually places all of the article on one page.”
Joy Montgomery
Process Analysis, Process Improvement, Integrated Resource Management, Usability Testing
“Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling because people can’t communicate clearly and concisely. You keep going in search of a point and sometimes find that there was none.”
Eileen Bonfiglio
IT Professional, CQM, CQE, SCM & Owner of Web Development Firm
“What I could live without:
Ads
Grammatical errors
Misspelled words
Babble”
Eileen
Wouter Broekman
Owner / webdesigner at pyramedia, information analist at DZH, musician/songwriter
“You asked a lot of questions, but my personal favorite annoyance 
is reading something because I require information, only to find out halfway (or later) that this specific article had a very, very long introduction to a hard-hitting sales attempt.. like I just learned from another question on LI, key to networking is sharing information openly and without hidden agendas.
Besides that, the obvious: bad contrast, popups, ads, extreme paging, bad grammar, bad spelling, lousy content.
I also believe that writing on the web is very much underestimated. Everybody can do it, but few can do it good.”
Richard Ireland
Marketing consultant at Western Consulting
“Amateur “journalism” and repetition of content. If you are looking for info on a particular topic, the one thing the internet can deliver is a million people who all seem to share the same opinion. It is rare to find genuine opinion leaders in copy-based content, but all too easy to find those that can ctrl-c, ctrl-v their content into their own blogs, or wikis or “social network”.
Oh, and pop-ups. And high-levels of roll-over text ads or hyperlinks. Give me a “related items” box full of links anytime.”
Daniel M. Kimmel
Film critic, lecturer, author
“I have a cable modem so it’s a fairly high speed connection, and yet there are times I have to wait for the needlessly busy site to load, or go through ads my pop-up blockers don’t suppress. Yesterday I needed one bit of information from a site and had to load and wade through two or three screens of junk to get it.”
Guillaume BELFIORE
Translator, Writer & Editor (specialized in new technologies)
“What annoys me the most:
-Secondary sources: in my opinion they are useless is they do not add something to the original news.
- Slow websites: I don’t care much about ads unless they are playing again the usability of the website and slow it down.”
John Bredehoft
Customer-Facing Business, Techincal, Requirements Expertise
“I read many of my RSS feeds on a mobile phone. If content is not compatible with mobile, I’m probably not going to see or hear it - occasionally I’ll star the item for later viewing on a computer, but more often than not I’ll just skip the item and move on.”
Rich Smrcina
Sr. Systems Engineer at VM Assist, a provider of System z (z/VM, Linux, z/VSE) support services
“People that can’t spell, people that can’t type (yeah there’s a difference). If you can’t take the time to proofread what you type, why should I take the time to read it?
Ads that take up too much room. E.g., I like reading Linuxtoday.com, but the ads are just to damned big (at least in Thunderbird RSS) !”
David Lambert
Solutions Architect, Development Manager
“No question at all - my # peeve is partial RSS feeds. If you’re going to do that, please do me a favor and just don’t publish a feed. I’ll wait for someone else to decide if you’ve written something worth reading and Digg it a thousand times — then it’ll show up in Scoble’s link blog and a dozen other people will already be blogging about it.”
Steve Custer
Systems Engineer seeking opportunities in Business Continuity and Disaster Planning
“My biggest annoyance is site designers who decide that everyone must be reading in 1024×768 all the time. I prefer to keep my browser around 800×600 or sometimes smaller, depending on the resolution of my monitor. When I have to scroll because designers enforce a 1024×768 format on their site, it makes me unhappy. If there’s content that somehow requires that size (like a particular flash applet or something), that’s one thing, but plain text can be wrapped; they just choose not to.”
Nick Davies
CTO at JP Morgan
“My biggest bug-bare is when I subscribe to an RSS feed so I can read offline, but the syndicated content is truncated and you’re forced to go online later to read the ending of the item. Sure many sites do this so they still attract visitors for ad-revenue but its frustrating.
Hope that helps,”
Nick
Randy Duax rduax@hsksearch.com
Executive Recruiter
“I loathe it when sites split content up on multiple pages simply to increase pageviews. It’s idiotic, and results in a lot of people reading the first page of an article and jetting.”
Bob McDonnell
Writer, Speaker and Trainer
“Long run-on sentences or paragraphs
Dark background
Dead-ends (can’t get back to home page)”
Larry Horn
Director of Information Systems at Phi Theta Kappa
“RSS - full content rather than blurb with link
adaptive selection - I don’t like it; I browse for a variety of reasons in a variety of roles (say for work, for personal interest, or a friend) and I’ve been burned by sites that made assumptions about what I wanted to see
ads - I use Adblock Plus, so I doubt a site-based ad control would be useful to me (wouldn’t scale, either)
annoyances - designs assuming fixed size and resolution; I vary my window and font size based on my physical location, what other stuff I’m working on, and my fatigue level; the most egregious flaw is a fixed pixel width with tiny font, where zooming the font doesn’t change the width; designers, you’re not on paper any more — get a clue”
Phillip Rhodes
Chief Architect - OpenQabal; Founder - Triangle Startup Group; Software Developer - Ineo USA
“1. Partial RSS Feeds
2. Obnoxious pop-over ads (especially the ones where the “close” button is nearly damn impossible to find)
3. pages that don’t render properly on Firefox on Linux
4. bad pagination. If you want to break your article into 62 pages with 2 lines each, at least give a “printer friendly” version that is one big HTML page… I’ll read that even if I don’t actually print it.”
The best and detailed response… Kudos Craig for taking the time to answer the most of the questions…
Craig Dunham
EDI Coordinator/System Analyst at Big 5 Sporting Goods
“What annoys Me in online reading…?
Well, most have been mentioned before:
- contrast issues (white letters on a black and white picture… not a great idea)
- too “busy” a document page (too many images, too many requests for attention)… addtionally, too much on a page can affect system performance and slow your page load - and you lose audience members… If I’ve got to wait a minute for your page to load because of your fancy graphics, embedded links, pictures, colors, plug-ins and so forth, you’ve lost My interest and I’m gone….
- pop up or “fly out” ads - and as mentioned above - those talking ones… “congratulations - you’ve won….” yeah, right!
- spelling and grammatical errors and punctuation errors…. and don’t just try to rely upon a spell check program to fix it… having THEY’RE instead of THEIR isn’t going to be picked up in spell check - they’re both correct, but there is a problem with mixing them up.
- using “texting” terminology (such as OMG, LOL, BTW, WTF and others) when trying to use a more formal or business like language. There is a time and a place for those short-cuts - but a professional blog or letter or site should not contain them.
- Too much information - too little information - get your point/concept/idea across in as short a time as possible, but don’t skimp on the information. Conversely, don’t burden us with too much minute information, either… find a nice balance.
- Links to “the rest of the story”… Yes, that radio personality used to have a great show with his bit about this or that, then an ad and then “the rest of the story”…. but when you’re reading something - that’s not the time to “click here to continue reading”…. if you want to direct a reader to another site, then give a brief - but COMPLETE - description of what is on the other page - the highlights of the piece - and then have a “click for more info” type of message… Don’t start an article/blog/whatever and give Me a paragraph or two and then “to finish click here”… I’ve lost interest and you’ve lost My readership.”
Lisa Davis
Senior IT Professional, Discussion Leader, & Tech Gadget Addict
“1) Poor spelling (USE THE SPELL CHECK!!);
2) Poor Grammar;
3) Poor sentence structure;
It is unbelievable that in an era when spell and grammar check should have revolutionized poor language skills, almost every commercial site on the web that I’ve ever visited–including sites such as CNN.com that are supposed to have an editor–frequently have misspelled words, poor grammar, and poor sentence structure in the content they publish to the web.”
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I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!