How to make a visitor to your website leave within 10 seconds.Or 10 things that will make sure your website is a disaster.
Just in case you want your website to destroy your business, try following these tips.
2) Block content and rudely keep insisting on signing up for a newsletter or something similar designed to capture data and haunt the poor soul later through emails and text messages. Don't give them a chance to take a look around and decide for themselves if they really want to hear from you.
3) Have a ton of pictures on the homepage and make your website take forever to load. Never ever use vector graphics. Just uncompressed, huge high-res images.
4) Have a flash intro that'll need a lot of bandwidth and take a really long time to load. Add some loud music to assault more senses. (oh, there's more good news - Google penalizes websites that load slowly- so yes, this is a good way to decrease the ranking of your website, if there is any in the first place).
5) Don't tell them upfront what is your site about. Hide your elevator pitch somewhere deep down in the website. Or, don't have one at all, Anywhere.
7) Have a bad UI. Make it difficult for people to find anything. Have fancy names for the standard pages like About and Contact Us.
8) Take it social. Have a moving social plugin that'll move with the page and won't let the reader see anything.
9) Did all the above fail? OK then, talk about yourself and show them page after page of jargon filled self-praise. Make sure there's no useful information for the reader, or how your product or service makes any difference. A simple trick to achieve this - start every sentence with "We". After all, the people reading your website love you unconditionally and would gush over anything that you do, the way a mother gushes over her newborn. There's nothing that gives them more happiness than reading up about all the wonderful things that you imagine yourself to be.
10) Want to make this better? Have a founders message, with an old, constipated face right on the homepage. Ramble about some vague 'mission' and 'vision'. You don't even have to write this. Just copy something online, and replace some words and the name. Or not. Trust me you, people will be so enchanted (bored brain-dead) that they'll never notice.
Did I miss anything? What's the most irritating thing that you find on websites?
PS: If you have found websites like the ones mentioned above irritating, and don't want yours to be one such, get in touch with me. It's not a bad thing to make mistakes, everyone makes them. It's the courage to course-correct that counts.
PS: If you have found websites like the ones mentioned above irritating, and don't want yours to be one such, get in touch with me. It's not a bad thing to make mistakes, everyone makes them. It's the courage to course-correct that counts.