The 7 Worst Things You Could Do To Your Website
Trying to scare your website visitors and online customers away? No problem—here’s some advice on the 7 worst things you could do to your website to accomplish that goal:
1. Make It Too Complicated – When it comes to websites, simple is the name of the game. Sure, they can use all of the right elements to look professional, elegant, or any other descriptive phrase you could place here—but never overwhelm your visitors by making it too complicated. Confused and intimidated visitors click the back button faster than you can change their minds!
2. Copy Or Borrow Content – Yikes…definitely don’t do this at all! First of all, using someone else’s written content without permission is asking for trouble—it is illegal after all. But the more common mistake is to use the same stock copy or descriptions (with permission, of course) provided by the companies you do business with that are given to all of their other customers to use too. This is considered duplicate content in the eyes of the search engines, and certainly won’t help your site build traffic.
3. Design It All In Flash – Using a little Flash design in elements of your website here and there is mostly okay (but remember, not all web browsers will display it). The real problem comes with using Flash intro pages or sites that are entirely Flash-based from header to footer. While they might look great, they make it practically impossible for the search engines to rank and display your site correctly.
4. Let Your Visitors Know You’re Under Construction – Resist the urge, just don’t do it! Claiming “under construction” as an exemption for not having the ideal customer-ready website is a major customer confidence turn-off. If your website isn’t ready for the mainstream, either wait until it is before launching, or at least provide an appropriately scaled-back version until then.
5. Give Your Visitors A Headache – This is easy to do by using too many flashy graphics or too many gimmicks and gadgets that detract from the message at hand. A couple of other sure-fire ways to give your website visitors a headache would be to use low contrast font/background combinations (you know, the red writing on the black background concept) or forgetting to keep paragraphs short and sweet. Whitespace is good medicine for web-induced headaches.
6. Use Non-Standardized Navigation – There are a couple of places where we’re all trained by experience to look for a site’s navigation. Across the top of the page is one place; towards the top of the sidebars is another. Anytime a website deviates from this standard, it’s alienating visitors, discouraging them from exploring the site further, and potentially creating a usability nightmare. Steer clear from unusual website navigation concepts.
7. Use Slow Loading Components (Or A Slow Server) – It’s surprising how many folks believe that just because broadband internet connections are practically universal these days, that it’s somehow okay to load a website up with huge-sized, slow-downloading components. The thing is, now that everyone is thoroughly used to their high speed internet access, the last thing that they have is patience for a snail-slow website or an overloaded web hosting server. Blink of an eye is the only way to go.
Okay, okay…so please don’t actually do these 7 things. They really will hurt your website!
Tags: search engine rankings, Web Design, Web Hosting, Website Development
