“Thou shalt not annoy website visitors” is possibly one of the most important of the inbound marketing tenets.
Yet we all see the same mistakes happening time and again on countless sites, and at the cost of higher abandonment rates and lower conversions…yikes!
Below we have assembled a short list of the worst offenders we have recently seen during our point-and-click “travels.”
1. Audio/Video that auto-starts upon arrival to a site.
This is something that has more or less become common knowledge at this point (and goes hand in hand with #4). Yet, we still see it time and again.
There is nothing worse than an inappropriate theme song or sales pitch cranked to “11” when you thought you were simply enjoying a little silent web browsing “me time.” Be sure that Play (and Stop) buttons are always prominently displayed, and allow site visitors the option to choose if they want to watch your video or listen to your audio.
2. Writing for bots instead of for people.
The days of plastering you website with hundreds of pages of keyword laden nonsense have all but gone the way of the palm pilot. This type of tom foolery simply does not work anymore for improving your search engine rankings. In fact, Google has become so sophisticated at recognizing when this is being done, that it will actually penalize offending sites.
Simply put, Google (and all of the other search engines for that matter) are in the business of supplying people like you and me with the most relevant and socially endorsed results possible. This is what drives their entire business model, and they will continue to adopt measures solely aimed at increasing this relevancy. Why fight it when working within these guidelines generally makes the web a better place for everyone?
Bottom line: SEO is just as important as ever, but not at the detriment of what actual people find of value.
3. Pop-up ads…pop-up anything really.
This one can be a touchy subject, as a number of studies have shown some pretty stunning increases in conversions when pop-ups have been used in place of a standard call to action (CTA). After all, we measure our success, failure or improvement by these conversion rates…right?
When we dive in a bit further, we see that those companies who have substantially increased the visibility of their static CTA’s (note: substantially increased visibility, with some having the CTA compete for home page prominence) have had similar improvement without the reported annoyance of pop-ups. To this, we say kudos to these companies for thinking outside the box and for using a little old-fashioned common sense at the same time.
4. The use of Flash.
We have marveled at some pretty darn amazing flash sites in the past…for the first visit or two anyway.
After the novelty wears off, you are sadly left with a “flashy” (for lack of a better word) looking, slow moving, and annoyingly difficult to use, “collectors item” website. Not cool.
What’s even worse, the search engines can not see flash properly, leaving you with a non-indexed, SEO nightmare.
5. “How in Sam-hell do you work this thing?”
This is easily the worst of all design offenses, as you absolutely can not even begin to worry about the look of your sites design before ironing out the details of how the site is intended to be used by your visitors (i.e. navigation structure).
During your website design/re-design, this is the single greatest opportunity you will have to influence how your site is navigated, to influence what people will be most driven to look at upon their visit. This is important stuff, especially if your goal is to have visitors fill out a form or make a purchase.
Please do not underestimate the importance of this step, or the disservice you will be doing your visitors if they can not properly understand your site hierarchy, or more simply put, understand what they are supposed to click next.
Share with us: What are some of the most annoying things that you just can't stand about some website designs? Post your answers in the comments below.
