Way Too Much Clutter

It's funny how certain behaviors that we will absolutely not accept in the real world, we'll more than accept when we're living in the cyber world. I know I put up with a few things in the cyber world that I normally wouldn't put up with in the real world, simply because it's a necessary evil. Like applying for jobs online.

However, there is one thing that I will not tolerate in the cyber world, simply because I will not tolerate it in my personal world. And that, my erstwhile friends, is clutter.

I repeat: Clutter.

In my opinion, clutter is the cleanest yet most offensive seven letter word that someone can throw at me. Even though I may joke about the organized chaos that is my world, I don't like clutter.

Especially on the internet.

I have several websites and blogs that I love to visit on a daily/weekly basis, but each time I visit, they take forever and a day to load. Why? Too much clutter.

If you go to a popular news site, say Fox News or NBC for example, you have so many ad plug-ins, Facebook plug-ins, Twitter plug-ins, and just plain old plug-ins on the site that more often than not, my computer will freeze from several to thirty seconds. And more often than not, I usually have to take drastic measures to fix it. Which in this case is bringing the Windows Task Manager into play.

I started using my Task Manager about 1 1/2 years ago, when Norton 360 was making my computer crash more times than SuperDave Osbourne. Even when I was able to temporarily fix the problem by adding 2 Gigs of memory, I never really stopped using it. It really does come in handy when I'm dealing with a website that has so much external crap to it that my CPU usage maxs out at 100% and memory suckage is at 75% (or more).

Because it's becoming increasingly aggravating to deal with this kind of stuff on a daily basis, some of my favorite websites are only visited by me once or twice a week. Which if you think about it, is kind of bad. As a business, not only do you want to attract customers/readers, but you want them to retain them as well.

A non-user friendly website that's chock full of garbage will drive away even the most determined user of your product.

Some of the websites that you might want to thing twice about using are:

The Hartford Courant (local paper)

NBC

Fox News

ESPN

Yahoo

If you notice, I haven't mentioned any blogs. Unlike certain commercial entities who don't do a good job with their digital medium because their forte is not digital, most bloggers are savvy enough to understand and realize that if their page takes too long to load, people aren't going to come around.

I'll finish up this post by asking the incredibly obvious question of everyone: "Do you have any fave websites that drive you batty because they have way too much clutter attached to them?"