10 Things I Hate About Your Business’ Website
September 3rd, 2007
We all have our pet peeves when it comes to browsing the web. There are some more than others that really grate on my nerves. I’m not talking about messy code or poor SEO here. I am purely speaking of aesthetics and usability.
- Flash Intros that take more than 10 seconds to load or good old excessive Flash- in fact, I’m not really a big fan of a large amount of flash of any sort. I will agree that there are some industries and companies that truly benefit from a well put together flash site. The reason this makes my list is probably pretty personal. I design websites for small businesses…a lot of mom and pop shops and small business owners. I would venture to say that 99.9% these small businesses will not benefit from excessive flash. Their clients are more likely to be on slower connections and could easily give up instead of waiting around for my client’s site to load.
- Buried Contact Info and/or form- you put your site out there for me to look at. You’re trying to sell me a product or service or get me to visit often. Why won’t you let me talk to you? Please put your contact info on all pages of your site OR a link front and center on each page or on the main navigation that says Contact!
- Long blocks of “monotone text”- I don’t know if that’s a widely used term or if I just made it up. But having long blocks of text with nothing to break it up…images, bold headlines, pulled quotes…pretty much anything to help my ADD brain to stay focused. I call it monotone text because those endless pages of same, same, same text remind me of Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off… “Anyone, anyone?” Give me a break…when I’m browsing around the web I’d much rather read Green Eggs and Ham than War and Peace!
- Too Many Gizmos- If I’m coming to your site to buy a bicycle, I don’t really care what the weather’s like in Kalamazoo. There are so many widgets and nifty little features available these days that make it so easy to add all sorts of random things to your site…if you have a blog, have at it, widget away. But do you really need to add them all to your business’ main website?
- CAPSLOCK MADNESS-a few well placed capitalized words or phrases are great to draw my attention to an important point. But if every other sentence is in all caps, your message starts to sound like a radio ad for a monster truck rally to me…SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY…
- The Neverending Pages- seriously, if you have a page that has enough content on it to fill up the screen 10 times over…maybe it’s time to give a few of those topics their own pages. Remember, I don’t think I’m the only internet user with ADD tendencies!
- Adsense, Adsense Everywhere!- Obviously, whether or not to include advertising of any sort on your business’ website can be debated eternally. I happen to be of the mindset that if you’re selling a product or service, the less distractions, the better. But some sites are purely built for raking in ad revenue. If that’s the case or even if you decide to put some PPC ads on your business’ site, maybe limit yourself to a one or two ad blocks…and make sure your content stands out!
- Deceptive Links- this one really might just be me, but it really bugs me when I see links to what I assume are 5 different pages on a site only to find that they are all links to the same page or worse, 5 different pages that are all identical!
- But how much does it cost?- again, there is much debate on the topic of showing pricing information on a site or not. I am a huge fan of being upfront with fees and prices. I know there are good reasons for and against, but I have to tell you the times that I actually go through the steps of contacting someone to find out more about pricing are few and far between.
- What is it?- You can spend all the time in the world designing a page that’s pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate or the best site in the world…but if I can’t figure out what your site is about and what you want to sell me or give me in the first few seconds I’m there…you’ve lost me!
All that being said, there’s usually an exception to every rule…notice I said usually, a few things are always unforgivable!
What are your website viewing pet peeves? Anything that makes you click away as fast as you can?
About
Loved the Kalamazoo comment and couldn’t agree more. Good post! (btw, im coming from your comment on ilovecode)
I agree with you on all of these!
Too many people seem to think that because they can run a business, they can design a good website. So without any help, experience, or research, they go out there and make every annoying mistake in the book. Meanwhile, I’ve taken my business elsewhere!
All deadly mistakes. And the first is the deadliest of all. Theres practically no need for flash anymore with the advent of AJAX. In the glory days of Flash it was a better solution than javascript, but not anymore.
As far as I’m concerned the only good use for flash right now is embedding movie or music players. The FLV and FLA content out there is pretty slick these days. But who knows for how long.
Good stuff there, particularly the first
One of the reasons I became so disenchanted at the last agency I worked at was because they turned all flash-happy. All flash, all the time. Rather than trying to deliver real value to clients all they were about was making things look and move nicely. Entire sites were flash based and took a LOT of bandwidth. I fought an uphill battle for them to even understand what ROI even stood for.
I fight that battle everyday in a different way. My clients are mainly smaller businesses and entrepreneurs who have never had a website. It takes a lot sometimes to explain that the flash sites that they’ve seen somewhere probably are not the best options for their smaller sites and are definitely not going to be the fastest way up the search engines for them!
thanks for the mention!
Good list. If I had to add anything it would be those stupid little animated gifs. They should be outlawed.
I’m not going to say anything about floating nav tabs on the side
I would agree on the animated gifs…touche on the floating nav bars:)
well, that’s good pointing…all of the good words in just few rows. Good Job