Friday 1 January 2016

Fight Back With Annoying Websites

Websites are there  for the user's interests, at least at the user's poiint of view, but for the sitemaster's POV, it is not only giving you what info you've wanted. It is also a way for them to have an incentive, like financial consideration, exposure, and rankings. There are legitimate ways to do this, but sometimes, they do employ some dark techniques to get what's in their POV, which makes the users frustrated on the friendliness of navigating the site. Here are the most common annoyances and their practical solutions.


Pop-ups and advertisements

These are the most common source of frustrations that could also make the browser unresponsive. The more data contained in these elelments could make the website grind to a halt, specially when the addon program that runs them crashes.  This can also be caused by excessive video and other multimedia ads that use more  bandwidth than the ISP provides.


Which Button?

Site owners confuse us which button to  press, they just deliverately place a download button or play button very close to an advertisement. Sometimes the advertisement button is more prominent or dwarfs the size of the legit button. This is turn makes the user press the advertisement button by mistake, but an advantage by site owners specially when that kind of ad is a pay per click.



Too slow to load.

Having more bandwidth hungry adverts than the useful content makes the site load very slow, so the navigation element, like buttons, arrows and so on,  could not appear as quickly as possible. Users end up waiting for ages or frustrated and just close the page if lucky that the browser is still responsive to the close button.

Solution:


Deploy an anti-pop up/ advertisement addon on your browser. To do this safely, deploy it with the browser's list of available and verified extensions.  Don't just google the sollution from your search box as google could point you to a spyware riddled application. Go to your browser's settings button(using firefox, other browsers will let you click settings then extensions), which is usually found at the right top corner of your browser and open the menu(1),  then choose addons(2). Type adblock plus at the search menu then click install. The ABP icon will integrate(4) at the browser after successful installation.


With the ABP in place, the site ( http://www3.forbes.com/business/15-new-cars-to-avoid/5/) has a completely new appearance than without it. It is easier to navigate without the disruptions around it. The page on the left is also easier to load as other elements are stripped.





Where's the button?

Another annoying problem is to look for the button to go to the next page or photo. It could be that the story is quite long, or the photo is too big that you need to scroll down the page to access the next button. And this makes it annoying,  if this is the case on every page.



Solution:


 The simpliest solution to this is to resize the page size by pressing "ctrl"  and the " - "  at the same time until you see the next button or arrow. This makes the page smaller so that more elements show at the screen. Another trick is to hack the page URL, this is easy to do specially when the site is logically arranged by numbers or letters. Below is the same site downsized X 3 showing the next button(6).



Like the URL   http://www3.forbes.com/leadership/20-richest-women-2015/2/, just change the "2" at the end to which ever page from 1 to 20 to go to the page. Changing it to /5/ will get you to page 5 (http://www3.forbes.com/leadership/20-richest-women-2015/5/) without clicking the next button or going through buttons 3 and 4, thus saving you time from cliking and waiting from the site to load before you can click the next button.








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