I spend a lot of time online, both for work and leisure. I love surf­ing the Web: I’m an avid reader and Inter­net is a gold­mine of information.

But lately, I dis­cov­ered a few trends that are to me, a vis­i­tor, a huge turn-off.

Here are my 5 web­site pet peeves or “Why you lost a visitor”.

Slideshows

A Slideshow I Won’t Go Through

Slideshows seem to be the lat­est trick-on-the-block these days. Ugh. What an annoy­ing feature.

I get it—slideshows gen­er­ally force users to spend more time click­ing around. It increases page views… and jacks up ad impres­sions. But as a vis­i­tor, slideshows are a waste of my time. Most are decep­tive and offer lit­tle in terms of read­ing value—they are just a large bland stock pic­tures with a few lines of text besides them.

So what do I do when I stum­ble upon a slideshow? I close the tab and never come back to that web­site again. You may get more page views but you lost a poten­tial reader right there.

Tip: Some web­sites offer a “view as a sin­gle page” option or you can some­times find a “print” but­ton that will open a new page with the slideshow dis­play­ing inline.

Paged Arti­cles

A Three-Paragraph Arti­cle Spread Over 4 Pages, Seriously?

Although I don’t hate that fea­ture as much as sideshows, I’m not a huge fan of unnec­es­sary pag­i­na­tion. Once again, in order to increase page impres­sions, some web­sites split arti­cles into five, six and more pages even though each page only con­tains a few paragraphs.

I hate hav­ing to click through mul­ti­ple pages to read a short arti­cle and I resent the fact that this fea­ture only exists to boost page views. What a waste of time!

Tip: I use AutoPager, a smart Fire­Fox add-on that auto­mat­i­cally loads the next page when you reach the end of a page. Yay for infi­nite scrolling of content!

Arti­cle Reposts

Next Time, I Will Read The Arti­cle From The Orig­i­nal Website

Occa­sion­ally, a head­line on a web­site catches my eyes. I click on it, expect­ing to read the full arti­cle on said website—not so fast! Halfway down the arti­cle, there is a line that says “to read the full story, head to our friends at www.blahblahblah.com”.

I hate that. I like to read the orig­i­nal arti­cle on the orig­i­nal pub­lish­ing web­site: first it deserves the credit and page views, sec­ond read­ing half of the arti­cle and then the end on another web­site is a waste of time.

Tip: Some web­sites belong to a “net­work” and use this trick to split the traf­fic. Learn to spot the trend and read the arti­cle where it was orig­i­nally published.

Trans­la­tion “Tools”

This Is Not Translation

I guess this one is a pro­fes­sional pet peeve and that most peo­ple won’t mind it. But it dri­ves me crazy—let me explain why.

In Canada, a lot of web­sites have a French and an Eng­lish ver­sion. This is true for all gov­ern­ment web­sites (for instance, Cit­i­zen­ship and Immi­gra­tion) and for big com­pa­nies (such as Wal­mart Canada or Home Depot). These bilin­gual web­sites are a great tool for trans­la­tors because you can check the proper ter­mi­nol­ogy by sim­ply switch­ing between French and Eng­lish, and of course they “speak” to the bilin­gual nature of the country.

But some web­sites are cheat­ing and their French (or Eng­lish!) ver­sion is sim­ple a “Google Trans­late” button.

Yeah, nice try.

Google Trans­late pro­duces gib­ber­ish and is cer­tainly not a good way to offer a mul­ti­lin­gual ver­sion of your web­site. Such trans­la­tion tools can be use­ful to grasp what a web­site writ­ten in a for­eign lan­guage is about but that’s about it. Seri­ously, ditch that but­ton and hire a real translator—don’t be cheap!

Reg­is­ter­ing to comment

…And I Won’t Leave A Comment

I like to par­tic­i­pate to dis­cus­sions and when I read an inter­est­ing or thought-provoking arti­cle, I often leave a comment.

Well, if I can.

See, some web­sites require you to reg­is­ter to com­ment or force you to use an account you sup­pos­edly already have, such as a Face­book or Twit­ter account. I’m sorry but I’m not on Face­book and I’m not sign­ing up just to leave a com­ment on your web­site. Goodbye!

Tip: When­ever you com­ment with an exist­ing social media account, just make sure your pri­vacy is respected. I may be para­noid but I don’t want to annoy my Tweeter fol­low­ers by hav­ing my com­ments pub­lished in my Tweet feed.

How about you? Any web­site pet peeve?