Since having started a blog of my own a few years ago I’ve become acquainted with hundreds of blogs. I can usually tell within 3 seconds of visiting whether or not I’m going to bookmark it or go elsewhere.  After a while I kinda figured out what it is that makes me tick about the practices of other bloggers:

10.  The massive and unnecessary use of stupid and pointless plugins

I’m going to say that I hate snap, or anything else that disrupts my ability to enjoy my visit to a website. Unless the plugin is providing some kind of useful functionality, it’s considered pointless, and a waste of resources and precious website space.

9.  Sites that just link to other sites

There are blogs, and then there blogs that think they are blogs.  When all you do for your ‘articles’ is link to other blogs that you wish you’d written yourself, all you’re doing is telling your readers that you royally suck at being a blogger.

8.  Ugly Themes

Ugly bloggers make ugly blogs…it’s a fact.  If you don’t know much about design or how to theme, just use one of the bazillion free themes for your blogging software available online.  With all the high quality themes available (for free at that), there’s no excuse for having an ugly blog.

7. Posting stuff that everyone already knows

If you’re looking for PHP blogs, chances are you already know and take an interest in the PHP language.  What I don’t like to see is “Hey, I’m a PHP expert…and this is how you use the phpinfo() function”.  Building on the basics to enforce functionality is good, but when the content of your site matches the content of, say, a dictionary or manual, it raises the assumption that you really don’t know anything about your niche. Post things that you think will be of interest to your readers, that they can’t find on hundreds of other sites.

6.  Animations

When I see animations I look back at this one site that I created in eight grade where I used this bright green HTML template with a floating genie and a bobble head moving across the page.  The site is actually still up and running with Angelfire after almost 7 years, surprisingly, and with no way for me to remove it since they obviously don’t clean out their servers.  Any who, unless the overload of animations is pertinent to your site or one of your posts (or you’re 6 years old), no one cares to see them.

5.  Forced flash intros

Have you ever had to site through the previews at the movies?  I mean, seriously, can I get a skip button or something?  If you force people to watch your irritating Flash intro so you can remind people what website they went to, who you are, and the fact that they want to kill you, they won’t stick around for it to end.  Unless there’s porn afterwards.

4.  The “i p0wned you” sites

Real hackers don’t brag about what they do… they usually post their findings for educational gain.   Most of the hacker sites out there are just script kiddy junctions full of general information that doesn’t help anyone, or hacks that never happened.  Honestly, unless you hacked Google or something, no one really gives a shit unless you’re willing to share the wealth and educate others on how you did it.

3. Music

We’ve all done it – you have that little music player in the corner of your site blasting away songs from the 90’s that you think your visitors want to hear while they’re reading about toilet seat covers.  Well let me tell you something – they don’t. Especially for those of us who surf the Internet all day when we’re supposed to be working, there’s a bigger inclination to turn our speakers off than listen to your music.

2. Talking advertisements and greetings

“Congratulations. You’re won an IPOD nano…” is all that comes to mind with this one. No one is winning anything, and I don’t need you to talk to me about how happy you are for me to visit your site.

1. Popups

It’s a universal truth – people hate popups. Obviously there’s some issue there when browsers are now stocked with popup blockers to keep that crap from hitting the screen.  It’s even worse when you get a popup that launches other popups, forcing you to acknowledge that you did in fact close the previous one.