Poll: Has the design or layout of a site ever caused you to leave immediately?

I usually get annoyed (and leave instantly) from a site that has the whole page (!) with fixed positioning, and since my fold is rather high, the whole navigation is usually hidden (since they probably centered the page on the screen). I tend to tinker the page with my firebug a bit, but when it gets to that, I would rather just leave.
And I get annoyed from flash sites with no off button (or the off button is under the fold, or anyway, low on the page) for the background music/noise.

P.S. The back link (”Go to previous page” link) on the poll (under it – when voted or viewing results) takes me back to the front/index page of this subdomain (after a 302 Found redirect).

Several design elements make me leave a site immediately. Mostly they are items that that distract me from the content.

Here are a few things that drive me crazy and make me leave a site ASAP.
*Flash intros
*Too many moving items
*Someone who pops up and talks to me or walks across the screen.
*Pages with audio that say things like “Type anything in the box and hear me say it” or “Hi there, thank you for visiting my site.”

Many times these elements are part of animated banner ads but they still drive me away.

I think special merit must go to the web site of this Sunday newspaper. The 8 point type, the rigid 800px layout, and the use of 1990s banners to list photo galleries would be bad enough. But try clicking through the top level navigation. It changes with every page.

There are so many poor design techniques used in this one site that I’m convinced it’s deliberate to keep you buying the paper copy!

Every time I come across a bad website, I have the ITCH to contact the company and offer them my services to re-design it!

IF they have a contact page (with a comment area), I usually contact them.

Nothing drives me more crazy than coming across a site that has EVERYTHING on one page! I hate scrolling and avoid it whenever possible.

I have the highest DSL speed in our area and have come across websites that have unoptimized images on the index page. If it takes me awhile for a page to load, I know that anyone on lower speeds will be sitting a long time waiting and probably leave before ever seeing what the website is about.

Another “make me leave” is a website where the search I used did not take me to the page the information is on in a site. If I were searching for “toads” and clicked on a URL from the search results, I would expect the appearing page to have at least SOME kind of information on what I was looking for!

(With respect to the previous commenters)
I wonder why so many people hate these flash splash pages, it’s not necessarily for them to be always the first thing you see on the site (unless it’s all flash) and I doubt they’re “bad” if done well. I believe they do have a certain function in a design, if not something else – to serve a clean page with the primary focus on the identity.

And I also think that the scrollbar exists there for a reason (I’m not talking about flash scrollbars – they’re usually too mutilated). If the page is up to 5 folds long, I think it would be fine.

P.S. I believe you should try John Galliano’s site, it’s a good contestant, my browser just keeps crashing on it (before it loads). A great designer, but with a problematic site.

I leave when I encounter:

- audio auto-play
- Flash intros that take forever to load
- frames (double scroll bars — yuck!)
- screens where ads take up 20% or more of the above-the-fold real estate (I get tired of feeding AdBlock wildcards)
- yellow text on a magenta background
- teeny, tiny gray Helvetica type for the main content