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101 page 3
Ways to irritate your visitors and drive them away.
Everyone has his or her list but here is the most common.
- Loud annoying music double annoying with no sound control If you can pick one piece of music or sound that is to everyone's taste the recording studios has a position for you.
- Long download times. Those large graphics and wonderful animations are nice if anyone would wait around to see them. They won't.
- Out dated information. No one wants to waste time pouring over outdated material.
- Crazy non-standard link colors. The one thing that is standard (blue) not visited (red purple) visited. Obviously blue text over a blue background needs modified, otherwise leave it alone.
- Hard to read text color background color combinations. Use good contrasting colors. Don't make it difficult for the reader.
- Frames Lots of problems. Hard to bookmark. Search engines have a problem navigating through them. Older browsers can not use them. Page printing problems. Stay away from frames.
- Click swapping No one wants to click on a site and when they want to leave finds out that they are stuck. I avoid these sites no matter what they have to offer. Make sure your visitors can click out of your site as easy as it was for them to click in. If you use a redirect make sure you set the timer so the visitor has time to click out and return to the
previous site.
- Lack of navigation Dead end pages, pages without proper navigation back to the home page. You should always be able to return to home.
- Poor navigation placement Navigation bars only at the bottom of a page. Navigation should always be near the top.
- To many gadgets mainstream users care more about useful content. If you don't need it don't use it. All the latest technology - pick and choose carefully. Let others field-test it and you will have more satisfied customers and a lot less headaches. There are sites for this stuff and it's not your business site.
- Animation Don't blink, scroll or move. Let the visitor find and read what they came to your site in the first place for. It wasn't to be distracted by your cute little animations, besides it just increases the load time.
- Orphan pages Where am I? If you did not get there from the main page and it has no identity you don't really know the purpose of the page. Pages should have something to let the viewer know who it belongs to and how to get to its main page. Identify your pages and let the reader know who it belongs to.
- URLs that encourage typos URLs should be short and sweet. This (~) is not easy to remember or type. Not everybody clicks, yes, sometimes you still have to type in a URL.
- Entire font library on one page Lots of different fonts on one page, creative? NO. Easy to read? NO. Just longer load time.
- One last thing Don't resize my browser window, if you do I won't be back to your site.
- OOPs One more and that is people doing business on the web, especially web design sites that don't post an easy to find email address. Some have forms only and some sites, believe it or not, only have phone numbers, some no contact at all. We say web design sites (only a few) because they, of all people, should know better.
Before you design your site
browse other sites and add your own list to these. You are going to work hard to get visitors to your site and the idea is to keep them there and keep them coming back.
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"Web site Help! Just a Click away."
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