Why Your Website Sucks: Login/Registration Rant

Logging in and registering are some of the most basic functions of a website. You’d think we’d have it down to a science at this point. Unfortunately, the series of tubes has not aligned in our favor.

Why Your Login Page Sucks:

You ask for a username when you actually want an email address. If your site requires an email address to log in, don’t try to be cute and call it a username. An email address is not a username. Nothing pisses me off more than trying to log in to a site that asks for a username when it actually wants an email address.

I’m a busy man, and I log in to dozens of websites a day. I have several usernames, and even more passwords. The last thing I want to do is spend the next five minutes doing the ‘lost username/password’ waltz in an attempt to figure out whether your site is asking for a username or an email address.

A username and an email address are completely different things- and as such, you shouldn’t ask for one when you want the other. It is the internet equivalent of asking for someone’s street address when you actually want their signature. Ask yourself: would you do that on a job application or legal document? I don’t think so.

Your Website Requires Email Confirmation To Register But Doesn’t Have A ‘Resend Confirmation Email’ Button:

I shouldn’t even have to explain why this is pure idiocy, but let me spell it out for you so-called “Webmasters” who don’t have a ‘resend confirmation email’ button on your site.

Your website requires email confirmation before a new user can login- no big deal. The problem is, most of us have spam filters, and sometimes confirmation emails get caught in these filters. You probably assume that this also isn’t a big deal, as your freshly sent email should be sitting right at the top of my enormous pile of spam, also known as the hoover spam. The problem is that spammers like to post-date their emails so that their spam appears at the top of the heap. I like to call it spam from the future.

Now your confirmation email is swimming in a sea of spam, burried under ten pages of viagra ads. I’ll be damned if I dig through “the bermuda triangle of spam” to find your lousy registration letter. I’m more likely to bulk-delete my spam folder and hope that your email hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s in there- it always is.

You’re probably thinking that I should have done that part first. At this point, I’m thinking the same thing, only I’m also wondering why the hell doesn’t your site have a ‘resend confirmation email’ button.

Now I (your potential customer/client/user) can’t log in to your site, and can’t create a new account unless I use a different email address. Sure, I have a ton of email addresses, but they’re for spam, so once I get my hands on the confirmation email, I’ll probably never read your anouncements or whatever else it is you’d like me to read.

I probably won’t use an alternate email address- I’m a hundred times more likely to say ‘to hell with it’ and forget about your site all together. Website registration your chance to make a good first impression, and you just blew it big time. Congratulations- you’ve just lost a customer, all because of one. lousy. button.