| Home >> Varia >> Software Engineering

How To Make Visitors Of Your Web Site Suffer

Hieronymus Bosch. Hell (detail).
(Hieronymus Bosch. Hell (detail). Source)

1) Introduction

There are many ways to punish people who visit your web site. They can be summarized in one principle:

Your visitors are seeking information, so deprive them of the object of their most ardent desire!

This general principle can then be subdivided into a swarm of small secondary rules, like a hornet's nest which is divided into a multitude of painful stings. Let's try to list a few.

2) Three obstacles, and one meta-obstacle

There are three categories of ways to prevent people from accessing information, and one "meta-category":

2.1) Electronically block access to information. There are many excellent electronic obstacles: pages that take a very long time to download because of excess images and ads, but also Flash Player, large PDF documents, a web host with lots of downtime, complex web programming in order to prevent the site owners of maintaining it, and in order to harm as much as possible indexing engines like Google, etc.

2.2) Visually block access to information. If unfortunately a visitor manages to gain electronic access to your site, you must right away fall back on another defensive measure, visual confusion. Here are some excellent tips: put lots of spinning and blinking do-dads, overload each page with text in order to make the reader giddy, put lots of images and graphics, especially if they have no connection with the content of the page, etc.

2.3) Intellectually block access to information. Assuming your visitor manages to overcome the electronic and visual obstacles, at least prevent him from gaining intellectual access. Don't put yourself in the shoes of a typical visitor, in order to anticipate what could interest him, don't summarize your site's content, don't supply gradual reading lists, etc. Also, make sure all your information is obsolete, incomplete or false.

2.4) Block all attempts to unblock these electronic, visual and intellectual obstacles. Even if you succeed in blocking access to information using electronic, visual and intellectual obstacles, a visitor could always try to work around all these obstacles by directly contacting a flesh-and-blood person. Don't let them do that! Don't give them a Contact page with your picture, your phone number, your physical coordinates, etc! Hide behind some anonymous electronic address, like 

	mask.for.terrorist@hotmail.com

And of course, don't answer your e-mails!

3) Conclusion

You're laughing while reading this article? Not me. I'm not making anything up, I've really visited many web sites as bad as that. And often they are Catholic sites...

It's not because we believe in the existence of Hell, that we should torture web surfers before Judgment Day!

| Home >> Varia >> Software Engineering