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How to Get Visitors to Really Hate a Website
A website can be a big asset
for any business. For a professional services firm it can tell people
about your range of services, introduce key personnel, and carry case
histories that demonstrate a history of success in your field. For a
client it can be a means of acquiring new customers or serving existing
customers better.
But a website can also be constructed in such a way that it turns off
visitors to the site and forces them to make a quick exit. A lot of
research has been conducted to find out what makes a website difficult
to visit and these ten techniques are some of the best ways to join the
list of the ‘most unwanted’.
1. Too Much Going On
There’s a lot of things that can be animated on a website – logos that
spin, text that slides across the screen, graphics that pop on and off.
All very much like a bad PowerPoint presentation where the effects
obscure the meaning. Keep animation to a minimum and use it only if it’s
needed to communicate something important.
2. Pop-up Advertisements
A pop-up box is usually an unwanted interruption when visiting a site.
When you go to a site for information and suddenly have your screen
covered by a box advertising a product your first instinct is to get the
thing off your screen as fast as possible to you can get back to what
you wanted to see in the first place. Pop-ups are intrusive and cause
early departures from websites.
3. The Long Long Scroll
Most web users are accustomed to scrolling down a page. This is fine for
a little while but some pages just scroll on down forever. A general
rule of websites is to keep text to no more than about one and a quarter
screens. What you do have on your site should be accessed without
excessive scrolling; break the content down into pages instead and have
a facility to go to the next part at the bottom of each page. Where it
really is necessary to keep it all on one page, try using a Table Of
Contents with links to sections within the content.
4. Music
Music adds nothing but embarrassment to most business website visits
when you’re researching something at your desk and suddenly up pops an
electronic version of ‘Greensleeves’. Unless there’s some overwhelming
version to have background music on your site, don’t do it. Even if
you’re selling music downloads make it a user-selected option to start
up the band.
5. Confusing Functionality
Every web experience needs to be kept as simple as possible. If you want
people to buy something from your website make it so easy that anyone
can do it on the first try. Keep the sequence logical, and help visitors
to make their purchases in every possible way.
If you have a range of products you want to expose on a website, group
them in such a way that visitors don’t have to see a lot of things they
don’t want and can go straight to what they’re after. Keep the number of
choices per page to a minimum to avoid confusion, and always make it
possible to search your site by keywords.
6. Stale Information
Some sites never clean house. They just keep piling the new on top of
the old. This is dangerous as well as messy since stale information can
mislead visitors or cause them to perceive your business as outdated or
obsolete. Content changes add to your site’s appeal and encourage repeat
visits, so review all content regularly and ensure that stale
information is removed.
7. Sites that are Incomplete or
‘Under Construction’
The Internet is a great source of information. It’s particularly
maddening to follow a link to a page that promises to tell or sell us
something only to find that it’s just a temporary placeholder, to be
replaced with a full site at some later date. Before putting a web
address on your packaging or in your advertising, be sure it’s ready to
view and will answer the visitors’ questions.
8. Slow-loading Websites
Some sites are so poorly designed that their elements load as slowly as
the early days of dial-up connectivity and 28.8Kbps modems. This is
usually the fault of badly-optimized images where the graphics are
excessively large and slow to download (regardless of the size they may
be on your screen). A site that’s too slow to load is an invitation to
hit the back button and try elsewhere.
9. Cutesy Stuff
Many early websites – those in the mid 1990s, were designed by technical
people for other technical people. They often used a lot of jargon and
‘in’ content that was deliberately unintelligible to the masses. Ten
years later this approach is a definite negative and unless a website
has broad appeal with clearly communicated elements it won’t hold a
visitor’s interest for long.
10. Inconsistent Design
A website is an entity that should be consistent in design throughout a
visit. This means using the same fonts, the same color palette, the same
size and style of graphic elements, the same navigation methods and the
same ‘feel’ on every page. As much as possible the site’s design should
be kept uniform so the visitor doesn’t have to make adjustments every
time a new page is opened.
There are several other ways to give a website visitor a bad experience
but these are seen as the ‘top ten’ by most studies on the subject.
Visit any dozen websites and you’ll find examples of most if not all of
them. Just be sure that anyone visiting your site doesn’t find any.
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