Website Design Quirks
The last thing that you want to do in website design is to annoy people and yet why is it that you’ll still find a lot of websites out there packed with elements that users can’t help but hate? Maybe it has something to do with the demands and strain of having to design your own website (or the excitement of it depending on how you look at it), its easy to overlook the quirks that you’ve actually experienced as a website user. Unfortunately the poor user experience that such web design quirks provide can lead to poor lead conversions, high web page abandonment, poor reputations and low search engine listing positions. Do you suspect that you could somehow be annoying your web marketing prospects – why not check out some of the top things people can possibly hate about your website?
Your Web design and development – What can people possibly hate about it?
Using a “Contact Us” form as only means of contact – Put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors. You are interested and in need of the products or services offered, or you need assistance and dealing with problems following your investment, but all you have is an online form after which you’ll have no other choice but to wait for a response and left wondering if you will ever get one. There’s nothing wrong with having a “Contact Us” form and it’s a great way to come up with a great opt-in email list but it is no substitute for clear and reliable contact information.
Pop-up advertisements – This one is a no brainer and probably the most apparent. Never the less, it’s important to get it out of the way in online marketing – pop-ups are downright annoying and yes it may help you acquire a couple of subscribers for your mailing list but is it a good trade-off when it annoys so many of your website visitors, causing them to leave without even looking at what you have to offer? Turn website traffic into profitable leads with quality content and interesting offers. Call to actions instead of annoying tricks!
Web page automatically plays multimedia content – never force anything on your website visitors because that would just be plain rude. Let them decide which multimedia content to play and be considerate. Some people may be checking your website at their workplace or prefers to browse in silence – what do you suppose is going to happen if you impose your multimedia content on them? They will likely look for the “Back” button and press it without even looking at what you have to offer!
Unnecessary animations – it typically takes 3 seconds for users to orient themselves on any given web page and decide whether to stay or leave. Wasting this time with irrelevant animation, flashy advertisements and interactive media that has nothing to do with your business is a bad idea. The whole thing detracts from the focus of internet marketing so its often better to not have those things and approach website design with quality and relevant content and clearly feature the things that they can do on the website.
Incomprehensible “About Us” Page – Is your “About Us” page something that your general audience will easily understand or is it full of fancy and unintelligible terms? Your “About Us” page is typically where website visitors go if they are looking to know more about your business and its not going to do you any good if the content appears unintelligible for them.
Titles do not match the content – When creating content for internet marketing, you may already know the importance of coming up with great and enticing titles. Good titles bring in traffic from search engines, emails and RSS feeds as they check out the things that you have to offer. But wait – what happens when titles lead them to something totally unrelated? Don’t be at all surprised if they quickly abandon your website in disappointment. While great titles are important – it’s a different story when you are misleading people with it.
Sliders that take a long time to load – If you want to feature various images effectively in a limited space then sliders are a great way to do that but only if it is done correctly! Sliders that take too long to load and opens up a new page every time someone clicks on it is an annoying feature.
Flash – Many businesses use flash on their website design which can present some significant problems in the web marketing perspective. The issue with flash is not in its limitations and you’ll see a lot of websites out there with stunning visuals because of it. It’s just that search engines are unable to read it so it’s not going to get indexed. Flash animations also typically take too long to load and would certainly annoy people looking for specific information on your website.
Misleading CTA (Call to Action) – CTAs should always be truthful and perfectly suit the expectation of your website visitors as they complete checkout and redeem your offers. How would you feel if a CTA on a business website promised you a 25 percent discount but then you found out that you can only redeem if you’ve spent $500 and more. How frustrating is that? Well certainly frustrating enough to destroy your business reputation along with conversions and what little hope there is for making a profit!
SEO Driven Content – If you’ve been in web design and web marketing for quite some time, you may recall that there was a time when it was good practice to flood your website with paragraphs filled with keyword dense content that don’t really make sense. Such content are solely meant for bots or search engine crawlers and even though search engine algorithms had become far more sophisticated than they were a decade ago, a lot of people in the online marketing business are still doing the same thing – creating content for search engine crawlers instead of actual users who are bound to doubt the reputation of your website (not to mention the fact that major search engines like Google will actually flag you for such a thing. Invest in quality and useful content that your users will actually find helpful and valuable!
