Six things that you must resist doing with your website
As we’ve all seen in our surfing of the web there are some websites that are annoying, sneaky, tacky or just plain frustrating. It boggles the mind how business owners could permit such conditions to persist. Whether it is simply ignorance or otherwise we will take a moment to illustrate certain best practices that all websites should follow in order to make a more friendly user-experience.
If at any time you notice that your website violates any of these standards do not despair! You can do something about it!
Animated GIFs
Surprisingly still in use, the ol’ animated GIF is sorely out-dated and sends adds 20 years to the face of any website. Animation is an invaluable medium and should be used (albeit sparingly), however in the modern web that means getting your animation made with Flash.
Solution: light-weight Flash animation
Back Button Disabled
Hands done the most annoying and worst thing a website can have is a disabled back button, where a user cannot leave the site. Although it is tempting to be able to ‘control’ your user and keep him on your page, doing so will cause him to simply ‘close’ the window and make sure he never comes back to your site.
Solution: Add compelling and valuable content so the user doesn’t want to leave your site!
Too many Call to Actions/Promotions
While it’s true a business has much to sell and usually has many very attractive offers to promote, you cannot just squeeze all your offers in the main banner of your website and hope that people will pay attention, because they won’t! All of your offers will compete with each other for attention and the user will just see it as ‘noise’.
Solution: There should be no more than one special offer in a banner, and if you have more you can put them as small sized blocks in your left/right navigation. You should also have a full page devoted to special offers.
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