Naughty, naughty, BAD web designer!

Today is my birthday, so I'm making plans to go to a movie. I went to Fandango.com, home of obnoxious, idiotic paper lunch-bag puppets, and checked the showtimes for a couple of recent releases I haven't seen yet. Trouble is, Fandango clearly knows better than I do which film I want to see. Every time my mouse goes anywhere near the ad for Balls of Fury (a film I am not particularly excited about; while it might be very funny, I'd give long odds it will be excruciatingly bad), the JavaScript widget pops information onto the front of the window, completely obscuring the information I actually went to the web site to find. Worse yet, I have to wait until the Balls of Fury blather loads completely before I can make it go away; the "X close" button is the very last thing to load. It's called a "mouseover" pop-up, meaning that it is triggered any time the mouse pointer passes over the target zone, and it's annoying as hell.

This is another case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." If I want to see more information about your ad, I will click on it myself; if I don't click on it, don't force me to see your content.

Technorati tags: Fandango, mouseover, pop-up ads