Saturday, September 11, 2010

Is Your Website Welcoming or Uninviting?

I encountered a website peeve yesterday.

Bad websites irritate me. There's the standard list of big no-no's we all know about such as bad grammar and spelling, photos that take too long to download (so please consider that some people still DO have dial-up!), and annoying music that gets you busted at work for browsing non-work related websites!

I was checking the website of a Texas event planner. I had encountered her through my facebook and was interested in knowing more about her.

Unfortunately, her website had the biggest no-no of all: The inability for me to even get IN her website!

It's too bad she hired some gun-ho web designer who was anxious to show everyone how smart and skilled he or she was, because I just got tired of waiting for all of the "pretty animation" to stop so I could just get into her website. The site had so many bells and whistles, it was taking forever for the site to download and open. Unlike other websites that gave me the option to "skip intro", this one didn't. I was stuck. Waiting.

And like I'm sure many of her potential clients did .... I left the site without even looking.

So as you start a business and get excited about how thrilling and unique your website will be, please factor in that the folks looking at it will have to actually get into it before they can be impressed.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing this info. It's nice to know I'm not the only person that has the pet peeves you mentioned. Also,a lot of brides use the cell phone technology to seek out vendors. Some websites just don't play well with cell phones.

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  2. I think more businesses should consider hiring a graphic artist to create custom art for their website and/or advertisements. I can completely understand not being able to afford hiring a website designer, but at the very least shell out some $$$ so you're not using some cruddy, mismatching clip art!

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  3. In addition, "splash pages" are generally a big no-no for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reasons. Google, for example, will come by your page while indexing and see a single page with no content on it as the home page, instead of a content rich page that is relevant to what people are searching for. Get rid of that fancy splash page and watch your traffic increase!

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  4. I HATE waiting for animation to load! If I can't see it in less than 3 seconds, I'm moving on.

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