The following are my 10 favorites:

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Let's face it. It is really hard to come up with new ways to fully irritate visitors to your site.

I thought I would share some ways that I have found to irritate visitors and drive them away thereby saving you money on your hosting bills. These tips are not in order according to their effectiveness, however #1 is by far the most effective. For 100% effectiveness, use any three of these techniques.

1. Install a script to disable everyone's right mouse click button. When someone tries to right-click, be sure to pop up a really insulting warning that accuses them of trying to steal your secret HTML code. Disabling the right click button will allow you to:

Keep the visitor from bookmarking your site
Keep the visitor from using the forward and back browser functions
Keep the visitor from opening your links in a new window
Keep the visitor from stopping a slow loading or hung page
Keep the visitor from using the Reload function to correct a display problem
Keep the visitor from printing your secret content
Keep the visitor from using such illegal tools as the Google site information tool

Admittedly the visitors can do all of these things with the buttons at the top of the browser, but maybe they won't know that and simply go away as you intended when you disabled their dangerous right-click button.

2. Create a really long page then starts playing your favorite song and put the stop and volume controls at the very bottom of the page. This will make sure they do one of the following:

- Listen to the entire song all the way through 5 times while reading your content, which proves them worthy of experiencing your site
- Try desperately to find the Stop button
- Go somewhere else to stop the song from playing.

3. Decide in advance what screen resolution your visitors must use in order to see your pages. It is absolutely a great way to drive them off when they have to scroll from side to side to read sentences of information. You can make this 100% effective by making your pages so wide that no monitor can display it.

4. The really professional irritator will not settle for just one obscure browser plug-in. Go for the gold. Use several bloated plug-ins that no one has already installed. This should drive away all newbies because they usually have no idea how to install even one plug-in, much less three. Experienced surfers will be glad to spend 20 minutes installing plug-ins to view your unique content.

5. When the visitor arrives at your site, be sure to pop up at least two ads behind their browser window and a minimum of two ads in front of their window. This will give them lots of options in where to go now that they have been sufficiently irritated to desire to leave right away. Even more important is the way you treat the occasional hard case that actually stays on your site after all of your efforts. When they leave, remind them to never return. Start popping up windows all over their monitor with windows that multiply every time they try to close them.

6. Sign up to use a really slow-loading hit counter and put the button inside of a TABLE so that nothing appears until the hit-counter responds. This is possibly the best way to keep visitors from stealing from you as it keeps them from even reading your content and possibly typing it into their site from memory. For this to work reliably, you must avoid putting the height and width into the call for the hit counter graphic. You can improve the effectiveness of this technique by inserting not only a hit counter button, but a long string of banner exchange banners.

7. For the occasional visitor that inadvertently makes their way to your ezine subscription form, fear not. All is not lost. You can still rid yourself of them by asking lots and lots of personal questions. Don't just ask for their email address. Ask for their mailing address, phone number, sex, age, hobbies, religion, race and some other things best not discussed here. This technique works equally well when applied to your order forms and minimizes your trip to the UPS office to ship products.

8. Splash page. You gotta have a Splash Page. Lots of slow loading animation. If you can combine this with the requirement to download another obscure plug-in, you'll have hit a home run. I'm especially impressed by the many sites that have upped the ante to include two splash pages before you ever get to even the first word of content. Stunning! Brilliant!

9. Reconfigure the visitor's browser window. This will drive them crazy! People hate it when you run a script on your pages that expands the user's browser window to fill the entire screen and then do away with all of the browser Toolbar features such as the Navigation Toolbar and the Location Toolbar,

10. Finally, an oldie but goodie. Make your background dark and your text just a shade or two brighter. This makes it impossible to read your text and will rid you of visitors before they have a chance to clog up you server logs. If this is not possible on your site, use the alternate technique of putting most of your content in PDF files so that the visitor has to download them and launch another application. Very effective.

Did I mention that all of these cool ways to irritate visitors work even better at driving away the people reviewing your site for places like Yahoo, LookSmart and other directories to whom you've paid large sums of money to review your site and add it to their directory?

Can I pull my tongue out of my cheek now? It's getting sore.

[This message has been edited by Jim (edited 02-05-2001).]

11. Under no circumstances include the price of your products on the same page as the description of the product. To satisfy the lawyers, you'll need to put the prices somewhere on the site, but a good hiding place is the Shopping Cart. Your customers will never think to look there because they want to know the price before they agree to buy.

[This message has been edited by OAC (edited 02-05-2001).]

For additional challenge, make the links you do have on a page to pages that do not exist. People will giggle when they fall into that "404" trap, and they realize they were dumb.

There is an extension to this that you can use too. When you send out emails, don't have a signature at the bottom with a link to your site. this way when they get your email, they have to figure out who it was from, and what site they are getting a response from. They will feel really great about themselves when they can figure this out by themselves--and they will feel better about you too!

17: Provide no method other than credit card payments for people to buy things off you. Checks/cheques are out-moded and should be oblished at once. After all, everybody has a credit card (especially in Europe)....

18: Don't tell people that you only ship to the USA/Canada. Wait for them to send you the order, you to process the credit card details and then, just as you are about to post it, inform them you can't send it.

20. Use the above techniques to disguise the fact that you had nothing to say anyway and didn't bother to write much of anything. This can be dramatically furthered through the use of strategically placed flashing banners and images to distract them from reading.

21. Use really t-i-n-y type as a "design element." And use CSS to make sure they can't enlarge the fonts. The heck with trying to read it -- they should be admiring your sophisticated design!

Corollary: all designers should have extra-large monitors set at stratospheric resolutions, and by no means should they ever test their designs on "normal" sized monitors and resolutions. After all, the Web is not about communication, it's about design.

[This message has been edited by loy (edited 02-06-2001).]

24b. Furthermore, when it does load by no means should you insert a "skip intro" button. This way everyone will admire your vecotored image design skills.

[This message has been edited by xelA (edited 02-06-2001).]

26. Have multiple midi's running on the same page, so they all play at once.

Combine the Java deterring method with the splash page method to irritate your visitors and they will never, ever come back!

(28) Don't wait another second -- make sure you crash their browser instantly.

A retailer with both a Mission and a Vision! I thought only people like Mother Theresa operated at such a high spiritual level.

Also mention you donate a portion of your revenue to a charity. Of course, don't say how much. Better yet, donate a portion of PROFITS to charity and pay yourself a million a year salary, eliminating a profit.

Special effects like javascript, sound files, flash effects, all have their place on the web, as long as they aren't too terribly long loading. I've never seen a fast loading site give me much of anything worth looking at visually, so I'm willing to wait around awhile for slower-loading, better looking and sounding sites. I think more people would do the same, if webmasters did their jobs a little better.

35) Ah yes, a great way to get someone to click off any forum while in the process of posting a message, is to have a forum software that makes you redo your entire post if you happen to type in your password wrong...and please don't ask me why I mention this here! Apparently when I registered here my password wasn't accepted, although it didn't let me know this until I submitted my post here, and then the post was gone. I can really use some music right about now.