Advice to Web Designers:

[MineralMan]

Do not put auto-playing videos on your website and have the speaker volume set to maximum. Are you an idiot? Do you not wish for your visitors to remain on your website long enough to see your message?

Just saying. Nothing will cause visitors to close the tab or click the Back button faster.

That is all. Thank you for your attention.

[SWBTATTReg]

1. good suggestion...

[DonaldsRump]

2. Absolutely!

This is incredibly annoying, especially at night when your SO is sleeping and you're surfing the net!

[Blue_Adept]

3. it ain't the designers, it's the advertisers

They put them into the overall google ads programs and the like. If you're getting google ads delivered on your site, you can manually set it so those dont' show but there are plenty that work around that as well.

At the same time, site owners ARE running those because that's what's generating revenue because what little revenue is out there these days is drying up. A lot of stuff is going to die off in the next year or two because that economy is on the brink.

[Control-Z]

5. What economy?

A lot of stuff is going to die off in the next year or two because that economy is on the brink.

[Blue_Adept]

8. the web advertising one

More and more sites are struggling as the conglomeration side picks up and advertisers aren't paying anywhere near as much combined with people putting more and more adblocks out there on their browsers. The smaller guys that are putting out quality stuff can't sustain it because there's no money in it.

[csziggy]

6. Some are ads, but some are part of the website

I really hate newspaper sites that play videos. If I want to watch a video news story, I will go to a cable or local news site. If I want to READ the story, I go to a newspaper site.

More often, the sites I visit once and never again are ones I do not expect to run videos. As I said, I generally will not return - the exceptions are those sites linked here on DU. Then as soon as the video begins, I back out. Huffington Post is one I almost never go to anymore because of their videos.

Recently I visited a recipe site that insisted on running videos of OTHER recipes, not the one on the page I had searched for. And the site did not just one video, it ran them one after another, after another. The really annoying part was that one of the videos had a recipe I was interested in trying, but there was no link to a written page for that recipe. When I searched the site for that recipe, it was no where to be found. Pissed me off since the video did not give amounts so I couldn't even re-run it to get the recipe.

[Yavin4]

4. Direct your post to the CNN Webmasters.

Click on CNN at work at your own risk.

[Pope George Ringo II]

7. Definitely one of the worst offenders

I accept that they were a television station originally, but videos running automatically every time gets really old really fast.

[progressoid]

16. Rawstory.

Their site slows down my browser (Firefox) to a crawl.

[Tipperary]

9. Oh I know! I HATE that! I have gotten pretty quick on getting off whatever site it is when I see it.

So annoying!

[mreilly]

10. And another thing...

.... as an IT guy, when I google for a certain problem I'd like to resolve it immediately.

Therefore when you time my presence on your site juuuuuuust right so that as I begin to become absorbed in reading the resolution to what might be a career-ending problem if not fixed quickly, DO NOT EVER hit me with a STUPID popup asking if I want to take a survey.

Oh, and for sites that block me since I'm using an ad-blocker: Go fuck yourselves! I'll find the same content elsewhere without being nagged, scolded or harassed for wanting to be left alone online.

[Leith]

11. I Have Lots More Advice for Them

Make the font readable! What's wrong with Arial / Helvetica? I've been to websites where the font was so thin that you couldn't see a small letter "L" at all! And don't make it in a medium gray on a light gray background. A little contrast wouldn't go amiss.

Do NOT make that video appear on the side and stay there covering up what the visitor wants to read.

Do not create a button to launch an app that does nothing. If the app wasn't quite ready by the deadline, at least give us a little alert saying so.

Speaking of alerts and pop-ups, do not, under any circumstances, make a box pop-up when the visitor did not intend to call it up.

Ads that move and flash make it hard to read the text we came to see (thinking at a website we all know and love on this one).

Whew! At least there aren't many 1990s style webpages around any more.

[paulkienitz]

13. also, don't keep telling us to download an app after I've said no, I don't want it.

Especially when the app does no more than the website does.

[paulkienitz]

12. Also, fuck "flat design".

And don't put a bunch of work into making your layout "responsive". If it needs that much work to fit on a small device, you did it wrong from the start. Make it simpler and you won't need to make it do a contortionist act.

But if the reason for all the extra layout complexity was all the advertising you were trying to cram into it, then FOAD anyway, we're done talking.

[TheBlackAdder]

14. Oh, it's horrible. Some sites I go to have a main video and ad videos that play at the same time.

[KatyMan]

15. And add a transcript!

I can read the contents of a 5 minute video faster than some schmuck reading it to me and absorb it better.
Oh and lose the "hey guys" salutation!
Now get off my lawn!

(although I mean both of my points sincerely!)

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. Absolutely. OK if people want video spoonfeeding, but most of us don't & thus don't watch unsummariz

Most of us don't watch unsummarized videos.

If a video is not worth selling in words to the prospective audience, then it is not much of a video.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

17. Yup. Bugs my music frequently. I back right out, don't come back for a while, maybe long time. . nt

[keithbvadu2]

19. Some that play are tucked away and not readily visible so you have to search to quiet it.

[LiberalLovinLug]

20. There should be some international internet consumer conference

Its about time, the internet has been around enough now. Make some demands.

I absolutely loath those automatic videos playing. I sometimes choose to wait around before I start reading for the video to start, wasting my time, in order to pause it, because the alternative is that just when I am getting absorbed in reading the story, this loud obnoxious video starts playing, it might even be up out of view so I have to scroll back up just to pause it. Grrrrrrrrrrr

Another issue is that I don't mind having to wait 4 or 5 sec to play a YouTube video, and skip the rest of the ad, thats a compromise I can live with, but what's with these full longer ads that are 15 seconds long? Grrrrrrrrrr