Stop Annoying Your Visitors
It’s one thing to get traffic to your website. You do search engine optimization, create a nice design, form a bunch of link exchange partnerships or even do a marketing campaign. It is quite another feat altogether to KEEP your visitors. The internet is no longer a novelty. It is part of daily life for many, many people and today most consumers are willing to put up with even less annoyances from the sites they frequent. Leave it to today’s consumer to demand more and tolerate less. Its just a fact, though.
I recently came across a press release from Hostway, a Chicago-based hosting company. The title: Survey Says…Internet Pet Peeves: What Drives Consumers Away From Your E-Business. They commissioned this study to come up with those things that do the best job of driving people away from a website. Among the top contenders are pop-up ads (93% dislike them) , registration log-on pages (requiring registration and login in order to view content) and Flash introductions. 89% of consumers said they are put off by requiring extra software to be installed to use a website. A full 70% of consumers said they’re not likely to purchase from, or even return to, a website after encountering one of these pet peeves. Only 25% of consumers said they would bring it up to the company, so that means 75% of those who get annoyed will just leave and you’ll never know about it. As to how consumers react to these pet peeves:
- 74% are extremely or somewhat likely to unsubscribe from the company’s promotions or messages
- 71% are extremely or somewhat likely to view the company negatively
- 55% are extremely or somewhat likely to complain about the website to friends
As for website design issues, consumers have their complaints here, too:
- 86% are highly annoyed by dead links (links which link to inactive pages or give a 404 error)
- 84% are highly annoyed by confusing site navigation
- 83% are highly annoyed if the page takes too long to load up
- 80% are highly annoyed by a site search tool which is ineffective
- 59% are annoyed by moving text
- 55% are annoyed by a poor design such as color, fonts and formatting
View the full results for the whole scoop, but that’s the synopsis.
What do I Do About It?
In order to best tailor your website to your visitors, you need to know YOUR visitors and what they want and/or are willing to put up with. This above survey is interesting, but its very general. For example, if your site has many forms to fill out, it could be that people are annoyed by overly long forms. In fact, a simple rule of thumb is that people want what they want NOW, and aren’t willing to generally work very hard for it. So, make forms as simple as you can get away with and still collect the data you need.
Some other tips to help you improve your website’s favorability with visitors are:
- Try to stay away from pop-ups. The advertising industry has moved heavily into pop-ups because they seem to get better response than the traditional banner ad. So, as a content-oriented site, it may be necessary to run pop-ups in order to generate adequate revenue. However, do so carefully. If you can afford to not use pop-ups, do it. If you must, then use a 24-hour cap so that visitors are not overloaded with them.
- If you have a site which is fairly large, be sure to use a search tool which actually works. If you have no good way to get effective search internally, you can look into use Google to search your own site. Provide a form for users to search your site via Google.
- Put a clear link on every page for your contact information. Post your email address to the site. According to the survey above, 75% of visitors are annoyed by being given a form only to contact the site’s staff. So, provide full contact info, and apply necessary anti-spam measures to the email address so that it is not spidered.
- Keep your navigation consistent and on every page of the site. Use breadcrumbs to show users where they are in your site. Provide a site map to guide them.
- Stay away from needless bells and whistles. Use of animated graphics, java text scrollers, and other effects are usually more artistic for the site’s designer and annoying to the site’s public.
- Stay away from large Flash introductions. They might look cool, but most visitors go right for the skip button so they can get to your website. If you are trying to use Flash to modernize the appearance of your business, that’s totally fine. But, find a way to do it without an intro. Let users click on it because they wish to see it, not because it is involuntarily thrust at them.
- Pay close attention to load times. According to my own Google Analytics reports, 64% of my largest site’s visitors are on cable or DSL. That’s great, but there are still those on slower connections. Also, just because one is on high-speed doesn’t necessarily mean the site will load up lightning fast. Also, realize that as visitors become use to faster speeds, their definition of “slow” will modify. So, keep your site as lean as you can. Use CSS stylesheets wherever possible rather than images. Use tidy HTML.
- Don’t use background music. Background music is right up there with animated GIFs in the “cool” department. It is not professional and will annoy.
- Keep the site current. Update out-of-date content. Keep your latest news on the homepage. You want the site to look maintained and fresh when your visitors arrive.
Hopefully this will set you in the right direction when setting up your new site or when you set out to improve the presence of your existing website.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...
- How To Draw in Visitors and Make Them Like You
- Really Communicate To Your Visitors
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- Conducting an Online Survey
- 10 Tips for Web Success
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