NFIB

Five Ways to Irritate Customers
04/ 15/ 2002

To keep customers coming back to shop on your Web site, avoid irritating them by making your site simple to navigate and full of information. In today's Workshop, Jeffrey Moses lists five things to avoid when designing your site.

1. Making visitors register before they can browse your site.

Even though requiring people to register gives you their e-mail addresses for future marketing, only a small percentage of people will even bother. They'll be off to another site with a simple click. Registration only makes sense for highly technical or specialized sites that need to limit the number of viewers or actually charge for access.

2. Having lots of ads on your page that slow the downloading of content.

Few things irritate Internet users more than sitting in front of a blank screen while a banner ad slowly fills in. Pop-up ads are almost as bad. Keep them to a minimum.

3. Having lots of graphics that slow the downloading of content.

Keep your graphics to a minimum (60K per page or less is best). And if your site has a lot of graphics, consider offering viewers the choice of accessing a "text-only" version.

4. Making visitors download special programs to view or listen to your site's content.

When plug-ins are required, make sure your site provides seamless linkage so your visitors won't need to perform the download themselves. They won't bother, and you'll lose them.

5. Making the site complex and confusing.

A poorly organized site that is confusing to navigate can be very irritating to visitors. Have a site directory, keep the branches of your site logical and make sure that each page contains easily accessible links to key pages. Keep your homepage simple. Visitors won't wait around while your fancy corporate logo and the picture of your office building slowly download. They just don't care.

Basically, if you don't want to irritate visitors, focus on speed of usage. Anything that slows down, confuses or in any way distracts visitors from getting to your site's content as quickly as possible is counterproductive to your ultimate interest, making sales and generating repeat visits.

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