What Not to Do when Customizing Your Neopets Shop and User Lookup

I am a Neopets hoarder. I have the NP that allows me to shop for pretty much anything I want at the site and clear shops if the prices are right. One thing I won't do is waste time trying to read small fonts, text that doesn't show up easily, pages that are slow to load or have tons of graphics and shops that have huge blocks of mall advertisements. I use the Opera browser when surfing Neopets and it allows me to do a one-click block on things like pictures, animations and graphics so 90% of the obnoxious things get blocked once and are gone forever or until I unblock them.

PreMade Lookups for Neopets: While this might seem cool it gets annoying when people use the codes and never modify them. Some have spaces where you can add up to three images you are collecting or seeking. Most of the time people never bother to change the graphics. Also useless: animated background graphics, reduced sized fonts on text and prices, music in shops. I have this disabled but before I figured out how to do that it was maddening.

Neopet Blogs: Equally annoying because people rarely put anything in the box and that means more scrolling. If I come across a shop that has a lot of low priced items but I have to keep scrolling down over two or three blogs I am going to just leave that mess for someone else. It's just easier to type your text on the page and eliminate the slow loading graphics.

Mall Banners: I am sure that people take a lot of pride in them but really? No one but newbies go to malls because the prices are obscene. If you are on a quest go to the Message Boards and ask someone to look it up. I still remember getting a quest for a TCG card and didn't know I could decline it. I went to a mall shop and paid about twenty times more than what the card was selling for on the Shop Wizard.

Unnecessary Text: Pricing things to end in different numbers is fine but when you have a huge list that people have to scroll through to get to the items in your shop, it gets annoying and is something that I just don't waste my time with. Likewise, I don't need to know how many times you have zapped your pet, who your BFF's are at the site or links to their shops. This also includes oversized text, blinkies and animated text.

Neopet Screenies: Put these on your pet page or post them to an outside account. I love screenies but they are a waste of time and bandwidth when posted on a lookup page or in your shop. This also includes the "Bring It Back" banner for the old site guide. If Neopets hasn't brought it back yet, they aren't going to do it because of some silly banner.

Fake Random Events and Snowball Fights: Useless things that no one really pays attention to. If you get a Random Event that gifts you with a Paint Brush and you want to do a screenie of it that's great (post it on your pet page) but making fake Random Events is a site nuisance. Even worse when they have "Click Here To Claim" and it takes you to some other page. Noobs fall for this all the time and it can really screw with them because they think they are getting something and all they get are cheesy graphics.

Seasonal Lookups: If it's June and you still have a Christmasbackground up I am not going to take your shop seriously. If you don't care enough to change it then I'm not spending my NP there. This also includes site events like Altador Cup, Game Master Challenge and Plots that have long since wrapped up.

Missing Shop Link: If you are going to customize your page make sure that you check it. When I am on the Shop Ad message board and click through to someone's page and can't find the shop link I don't bother going to the post to see if they have it there. Modifying the size and color of the text makes the page load slower and this hoarder won't waste time with that nonsense.

Premium Advertisements: The basic advert for Premium at Neopets isn't bad but when someone has all of the "benefits" of it typed out or in graphics it can be more than a little annoying.

I am more than willing to spend huge amounts of NP on reasonably priced things but if your shop is loaded with graphics, hard to read, has more than one Neopet blog or any of the other above mentioned issues I will just skip over it. If you have a fully stocked shop but your sales seem sluggish you might have some kind of viewing problem. I would much rather hit a plain boring page than something that has unnecessary things added to it.