If you’ve known me online for a while you know this is a huge pet peeve of mine…websites that make noise as soon as you visit them.

Drives me batty. Like movie sites, vacation planning sites want you to have the full multimedia experience. I get that. But often I’m listening to something in iTunes and it drives me nuts when a website wants to compete without asking me first.

Salesforce’s Dreamforce site used to load and immediately start with interviews of folks excited about the conference. First time, fine. When I was going back to the site regularly to look at the agenda or check a speaker bio, it was ridiculous and annoying. This year, so far, the site is blessedly quiet. What about people who were sitting in a cubicle, legitimately going to the conference for work?

Another offender is the Disney Vacation Club. At least the main DVC site has a little volume button you can click as soon as the page loads. But it’s not sticky…come back, get blasted again.

Once you login to the Members-only area, a new tune starts and there’s no little button to click to get it to shut up. I’m listening to something in iTunes, so I don’t want to mute my computer and I’m on this page because I need to do business with the site (we have a DVC trip coming up in August).

Over the years I’ve asked Disney to quiet the members-only page. You have our money already, just let me make a payment or see a point chart without being serenaded. Somehow, they’re not listening to me. 😉

I know there are plug-ins I can install that will disable flash and scripting, but I’ve found those to penalize my surfing experience on other sites that know how to respect their visitors.

Is there anything that can selectively, on a site-by-site basis, only disable useless background audio?