Front end engineer here, or what you might term as a “web designer”. Completely agree with Emily (a different one). Bad design is often a sign of a larger problem in a company than just that the web designer is incompetent. Us web designers push hard for good design, but ultimately, we have to build what our managers agree to. (And then we look for companies that take good design seriously).

Yes. Exactly this. I was coming over here to mention that.

They just started it and it is SO ANNOYING.

I X’d out of the site, and have not gone back. It was like a little kid “now, now, can we now? Huh, what about now?” No thanks.

And I’m getting tons of email from Zulily that I can’t quash because I must have mis-typed my password when I signed up to look at the site, so now I can’t unsubscribe. I have to make a filter to just delete the endless emails I get now, I guess. In that case, a particular shoe was on sale, and I learned that it’s not made in my size. That’s all I wanted to know, but now I’m stuck with them. I’ll probably never order anything!

…or because business or technical interests won the fight.

Yep. I’m gonna leave this here:

How a web design goes straight to hell

I was coming here to say this about the teeny fonts. Also, this goes double for the mobile sites, especially if the site is not responsively formatted enough for me to read on my phone without scrolling right or left to read the entire sentence.

Install Adblock and Adblock Plus to help squelch the ads. Some sites will prevent you from browsing them without seeing ads but you can either whitelist those sites or go somewhere else.
Also NoScript is great if you are relatively computer savvy.

And while I do it – most sites are making money by their ads. However, when their ads cause my browser to lock up and/or crash they have lost me as a customer.