I can’t think of any nice way to put this, so I’m just gonna say it: I really hate your website. Looking at it makes my eyeballs bleed. The pain and suffering that it inflicts upon the world has caused me to question my belief in a benevolent God. I just finished writing a letter to the Hague requesting that the creation of your website be prosecuted as a war crime.

Among its many grievous crimes:

Flash
You did the entire site in Flash. In addition to making everything much slower, this also completely defeats the mechanism of open standards that has made the Web such a success. Now I have absolutely no control over my browsing experience at your site. Also, I can’t view it on my iPhone. I can’t bookmark the only page on your site that I’m actually interested in. And if I happen to have special accessibility needs, I can’t use your site at all. Why do you hate freedom so much? What do you have against disabled people?

Unconscionable Use of PDFs
Look, PDFs exist for a very specific purpose. They are to be used when you need to give someone a perfect replica of a printed document, for instance a sales brochure. I should not have to download a PDF just to read your FAQs.

Non-Standard Navigation
Maybe you don’t understand the purpose of site navigation controls. They allow you to quickly and easily navigate the site. I know you think that the ones you made that pop out of a little button halfway down the page are really ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’, but I shouldn’t need navigational assistance to find your navigation controls. These controls should be in a bar across the top of the screen, or in a bar down the left side. I’m even willing to overlook some extras along the bottom of the page, as long as they are discrete. But the navigation controls should always be visible; they should never hide themselves.

Printing Problems
I don’t even know how you managed to do this, but your site doesn’t print correctly. Maybe you have some horrible and convoluted CSS that causes it. The important page on your site comes out to three printed pages. Of course, all of the stuff I care about is on the first page. The other pages are just junk that your lawyers made you tack on the bottom. So I tell my browser to just print the first page. What do I get? Your logo and top navigation bar. Nothing else. The only information on your entire site that I actually wanted has just disappeared into the void.

Browser Dependence
You may not be aware of this, but there are web browsers other than Internet Explorer. Nearly half the world doesn’t use IE, and I happen to be one of that group. Why doesn’t your site work properly in my browser? Why are you restricting your site to only people that use a Microsoft-brand browser (which, by the way, means it’s also restricted to only people that use Windows)?

Automatic Videos
So I go to your website, for whatever reason people go there, and some video starts automatically playing. Not only does it slow everything down, distract me, annoy me, and take up valuable screen real estate, it also has sound. Now your your stupid video is screaming in my quiet office and everyone is looking at me. Congratulations, you have created the commercial equivalent of a MySpace page.

Slow Ad Servers
You know, it’s annoying enough that I have to look at ads on your site at all. But when I click on a link, and the page starts to load, and then it stalls before it’s even a quarter done, and I look down at my status bar and see “Waiting for ads.doubleclick.com”, that’s really infuriating.

Because of you, somewhere, a Care Bear is weeping.