I enjoy visiting a lot of different blogs in different niches. I like to visit at least 10-20 a day. I have been doing this for a few years now and I have noticed some things that drive me a little crazy when I see them on a blog…
1) Music that plays by itself. I don’t see this as much anymore. When I am looking through blogs I am usually listening to music or a podcast and if music starts randomly playing on a blog, it is a huge turn off for me. In fact, it drives me nuts. Any music you have on your blog should not start automatically. I understand wanting to share music but it is so much nicer to let the reader chose if and when they want to hear it.
2) White writing on a black background. This is frustrating because it is hard to read. I might really enjoy what you are talking about but if it is hard to read I am more likely to stop following you. It also can give some people a headache and that isn’t good. It might work for sites that are more photos than words as photos look really nice on a black background.
3) Word verification or captcha. I hate this. I really really hate the Blogger.com version of it. I usually can’t even figure out what the numbers or letters are. Now I know spam is a problem but there are other ways to deal with it. Word verification is a huge turn off to me. I also don’t like when I leave a comment and get up from my computer only to come back to it hours later to see I missed filling it out.
4) Not allowing comments. I know there are certain blogs where this is needed but if I am reading your blog and want to respond, let me leave a comment. I don’t want to click on another link and go somewhere else to do it. I want to leave it right there on your blog. I can understand turning off comments if things get too heated or even after a certain amount of time.
5) No way to share you on Social Media. I know that I can copy and paste your link to whatever social media site I want but it is a lot easier if you have a button right there for me to use. It makes it easy for me to share your post which is better for you. If nothing else make sure you have share buttons for Google+, Facebook and Twitter as those are the most popular of social media sites.
Not everyone blogs the same way and there is a lot of debate about how to handle things in the blogging world but I think most of us bloggers would agree on this list. When you have your own blog, you don’t want to be turning people off for silly reasons that you could easily change.
I agree with this entire list! I’ve left sites when I couldn’t figure out the word verification. I also dislike when I can’t even view the comments on a blog without being signed in.
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Thank you for sharing your experience. Here I would like to underline something you often do that is visiting at least 10-20 blogs a day. This is amazing and I will try to do that. Eventhough I may not visit as many blogs as you visit but I think visiting other blogs will give many advantages, experiences and more value to me.
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Julie,
It’s like you took my pet peeves right out of my head and put them into an article!
I’m glad another blogger feels the same about this stuff.
Actually I stumbled on a very “official” looking site a few weeks ago that played music when the page loaded. I thought we were past this in 1996.
The white writing on black background is really painful, if I see this then I instantly close the site .. unless the site has something REALLY AMAZING to show me then I’ll hang around for a little longer.
The captcha issue is getting stupid .. some of the ones I’ve seen recently include – abusive language, different languages entirely and symbols that don’t exist on my keyboard (I suspect they don’t exist on any keyboard anywhere else in the world). At this rate it will only be the spammers/bots that are able to fill these in!
I can see certain situations where a blogger may wish to disable comments but only on certain posts. If comments are removed then it removes the majority of the potential for engagement .. that’s not going to help at all!.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a blog that doesn’t allow us to share it via social media and it’s baffling when we think about it really that people aren’t using social buttons.
The other one for me is when people make it difficult to connect with them on social media .. a few sites I’ve visited recently I couldn’t find anything really which is surprising.
We could some all these up I think really .. they’re all things that are hindering success online.
Btw, I was wondering – how do you find the time to check out 10-20 blogs each day? That’s some accomplishment, especially doing that for so long.
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Not all people like listening to music while visiting a web and I do not either. Listening to music while reading is often annoying for me. I can not focus on reading.
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