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I believe some people create and publish websites for sole purpose of tormenting their visitors. Browsing various websites and navigating Web can often be like trying to read on an airplane while a kid kicks back of your seat and baby next to you alternates between screaming, crying and drooling on you. There are some excellent websites out there to be sure, but there are also a lot of dreadful ones too. The latter are bane of so many people’s existence, especially those who use Web regularly.
The Net continues to grow in popularity and importance for consumers and businesses alike. Therefore, quality of sites needs to keep pace. Creating and maintaining high-quality websites is more important now than ever. Higher quality equals more revenue.
The following lists top ten ways that a website misses boat and contributes to hair loss and nervous breakdowns. Notice common thread that runs throughout each of these. Namely, a bad website neglects to consider site visitor’s experience in some fundamental ways.
1.Animation Seven year-olds like watching animated cartoons on Saturday morning, business people, professionals and most other adults don’t. Sites that include showy Flash animations as an ‘Intro’, animated gifs on every page, or flying words are really annoying. They take away from content and distract visitor from achieving their goals. Unless your site is an entertainment site, try to avoid maddening motion. However, if your product or service can be better demonstrated using Flash, Quick Time, or other multimedia, which is common, offer your visitors chance to click a link to view it. But don’t force them.
2.Too much scrolling Once I scroll down a full screen’s worth, my eyes start to blur, I feel slightly lost, my head spins and my interest wanes. Computer monitors really aren’t best medium for reading. The Net and many sites are so big that it’s important to always provide a clear frame of reference for your visitors at all times while they’re on your site. If a page requires two full screens of scrolling or more, simply split it up into multiple pages.
3.Long, text-heavy and blocky paragraphs of unbroken text I really have to be into a topic or desperately need to glean information to trudge through big chunks of unbroken text online. If I’m just shopping around for a product or service, you’ve lost me if I have to endure this kind of torture. Again, it is harder to read text on Web than in other mediums such as books. Additionally, Web users are notoriously impatient, so make your content easy to read and non-intimidating. Use titles, sub-titles, small paragraphs, bullets and numbering.
4.No obvious ways to contact company If all you supply is an email on your website, your legitimacy may be questioned. Why can’t you answer phone? Why hide behind an anonymous and cold email address? Make it easy for your existing and potential customers to talk with you.
5.Unchanging or out-date content If I start reading content on a site and soon discover that content was written three years ago, I split. Since there’s so much information out there, my reasoning is there’s got to be comparable information online that’s more current. If you keep your content fresh your site will attract repeat visitors. And repeat visitors are more likely to turn into customers.
