Is Your Company’s Web Site Annoying Your Visitors?

IndianaChamber_clrGone are the days of being greeted at web sites by dancing hamsters (unfortunately) and similarly gaudy pieces of clip art, but that doesn’t mean web sites still aren’t ticking people off. E-Releases has some useful info about what may be sticking in the e-craw of some of your visitors:

Here are 7 things that annoy website visitors.

1. Slow loading times – I’ve seen studies that say internet users give a website 8 seconds to grab their attention. If it doesn’t satisfy them during that short time period, they’ll back out and go elsewhere. People are impatient. That’s why it’s so important to have a fast loading website. Here’s a good post with tips for increasing website loading speed.

2. Autoplay music or video – Seriously, this isn’t 1998. If your website starts playing music or video as soon as someone lands on it, you can bet more people than not will leave. It’s intrusive and annoying. Give visitors the option of playing the music or video. Don’t force it on them.

3. Cluttered layouts – Have you ever walked into a messy room and tried to find something? It’s overwhelming, right? The same thing goes for a cluttered website layout. If every single space on your website is filled, you’re going to overwhelm visitors and make it too difficult for them to use your site. Remember, less is usually more, and white space is your friend.

4. Poor navigation – Internet users have grown accustomed to using websites in a specific manner. They expect the navigation to be along the top or left-hand side of the page. They expect the navigation to be clear and the website to be organized in a logical manner. Don’t try to change this up. Keep it simple.

5. Forced registration – Look, I understand you want to collect data for marketing purposes from your visitors. But there’s nothing more frustrating than forcing visitors to register before they can take certain actions. Most people don’t like giving out a lot of their personal information, so you’re only going to drive them away by doing this.

6. No contact information – Your visitors shouldn’t have any problems getting in touch with you. You should have a dedicated contact page on your website, contact forms throughout, and you can even post your phone number or other contact info on each page of your website.

7. Too much Flash – There’s nothing wrong with having some minor Flash elements in your website, but when your entire site is based in Flash, you’re going to have some problems. First, you’re losing most mobile internet users. And then you run into problems with simple usability issues like bookmarking pages, clicking the back button, etc.