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.
Copyright 2004, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.
Chris’ combination of academic credentials, career experience and temperament ideally suit his calling as a business development advisor. Clients say he has a mind for business and a heart for service.