Website expectations: What would you want exactly?

I like media .. any kind of media used in moderation can make a web presence pop more, and more often, than even graphics alone can .. combine the two, and you’re traveling the right road IMHO.

What do I want from a website?

It might be easier all the way around if I started out with what I don’t want in a website.

I’ve done eCommerce sites a lot over the years .. I actually owned two for about 9 years — had all of the bells and whistles each, the best payment gateways, 256bit ssl in the back ends of the dedicated server solutions, and more gadgets and gizmos than you could ever imagine.

One thing I don’t like at all on an eCommerce site, is when the buy button looks nothing like the checkout button .. I’m sort of graphical in that regard — everything has to blend and match — the cart pages have to look just like all of the other pages regardless of whether or not the overall site looks like poop .. things have to match up design wise. On my eCommerce sites, I had to have it all, because I want it all when I shop online .. suggest features, coupon features, layered and faceted navigation features, wish list features … well, I’m sure you get the picture.

The biggest pet peeve I’ve had over the years with eCommerce sites, have been the ones that require you to “Create An Account” .. or .. “LOGIN” .. before you can shop .. those kinds of eCommerce solutions are absolutely worthless. I mean, you can only take a “Call To Action” so far before running the whole shooting match off the rails entirely. A lot of well intentioned and potentially successful online store owners lost their asses because they bought into that kind of “Login Before You Can Shop” tripe. Just put the login button up there toward the top somewhere … we’ll find it .. we’ll click on it .. but only if we want to.

If you were to ever visit my site, you might notice that I’m high into color .. black and white is fine of course .. don’t have a problem with it really .. books have to be read, and I read my own fair share of them. But websites on the other hand .. now there’s a whole ‘nuther animal. Dress ’em up if you can .. keep it crisp, clean, and concise .. not too much of this or too much of that, and you’ll have me visiting you to no end.

As far as scripted scrolls and flying banners? .. um .. the ESC Key is my nearest and dearest friend. I’ll hit that thing faster than you could say holla-at-gowalla .. fail sites all, those who would dare to interrupt my good user experience with nonsense like scripted sign-up forms or ads that go all off floating across my panel.

News sites are famous for being abusive with their scripted pops and fly-outs .. out of all of the online web properties that exist in the WWW, news organization sites are the most abusive in that regard.

The next fail on the list would have to be those sites that write nearly all of their internal links in with Target=”_blank”/Target=”_new” .. Nothing smacks of inconsiderate/arrogance more than a navigation plan that gives you more windows/tabs than Carters got little liver pills. Google comes to mind in this case — yes, the techies at the plex are seemingly too afraid of losing their place that they’ve got to write every other link in with the Target=”_blank” attribute .. and there are indeed others out there that do the same in that regard.

The sort of websites I like, are the ones that don’t jump all over the place when the pages load. Some site owners have nearly every script imaginable in that page code of theirs and at times it shows .. Even Google adsense scripted pages have that sort of problem, in that you can’t navigate to the page you want until “ALL” of the ads load. The Weather Channel site is really bad for this .. MSNBC is yet another one .. pages that just have to jump up and down and all around because the site owner has an “Advertiser”.

I’ll take issue with any website who’s developer misapplies Java Scripting .. If people would actually sit down and take a bit of time out of their day to learn this stuff, web properties like the Weather Channel and MSNBC wouldn’t appear to be such epic fails.

I’ve got my list of least favorite places to visit online .. Most of these all have page loading problems or the scripting is written in such a way so as to degrade the overall user experience.

What are a few of the sites you are least likely to visit as a result of some of the issues mentioned above?

Let me know in the comments below.