Dear WordPress users and website abusers, take note. Nothing is more annoying than visiting your website or blog for the first time and within 20 seconds a popup box asks me if I want to subscribe. I haven’t looked at your content or your site. No, I don’t want to follow you. You just pissed me off. Enough of the constant advertising and click counting. Produce good content. Really good content. Produce a great website that is easy to use and clean. Nothing turns me off more than a cluttered website with several advertisements popping up over the text I am trying to read, all in less than the 60 seconds I have been on your site.
If you are producing something that is worth visiting, I will come back. Others will come back. And we might even follow you, like your facebook page, or follow you on twitter. It’s so invasive to not be able to click on an article or photo and just peruse a site in peace before you are asking me to support you in some way.
And I have to say that I almost don’t ever visit websites about beauty anymore. The authors of most of these sights are so hooked into doing product reviews or getting a freebie that I feel as if I am reading a commercial for whatever brand you are promoting that week. It’s shallow and it’s dishonest.
Bloggers are not the worst offenders of this insidious, over-the-top advertising. I used to love pinterest. Today, it just shows everything I have ever searched for on google or on their site rather than showing me the “everything” category I just clicked. It is one long annoying advertisement. Needless to say, I don’t go there much anymore.
Long-time traditional print magazines are the worst. I love to peruse design magazines, such as Traditional Home and Southern Living, online, but it just isn’t worth the two minutes it takes to load a page so that the site can load all of the advertisements it is going to foist upon me. After the page finally loads, I am then forced to wade through the popups as I click on one slow photo at a time. If you’re listening, ain’t nobody got time for that.
I understand that everyone wants to make a buck and everyone wants notoriety for their website, but that takes time. A lot of time. You can’t shortcut building an audience by over-advertising or annoying potential readers with pleas to like your site. Take a moment to remember why you started your blog. If it wasn’t to make money, then maybe it is time to return to your roots. Communicating about something you feel passionate about shouldn’t make me feel like a cornered customer in a car lot who is forced to listen to a sales pitch by an overeager sales person. I really was, “just looking.”