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Having been on the web for many years now, there have always been things that people put on their sites that are irritating to visitors and frankly, are just bad practice. Well, today I thought I’d highlight some of those crimes the web police should be arresting people for!
1. Mission Statements
Just about one of the worst things that people put on their site. These are usually meaningless to website visitors and usually ramble on about good customer service. Well in this day and age, if customer service doesn’t cut the mustard, you’ll soon be out of business anyway. Save mission statements for NASA and concentrate on the benefits of your products or services, what makes your organization stand out from your competitors.
2. Meaningless Jargon
If you have a lot of jargon in your industry (and the web industry is one of the worst), save it for those in the know, not for people looking for your services who don’t really understand what it means. Write in language that your customers can understand. Content written in geekspeak or gobbledygook just makes you sound arrogant and pompous.
3. Pop Up Newsletter Sign Up Forms
I hate pop ups and when I’m being hassled to sign up to a newsletter by a pop up, it puts me off signing up even more. I particularly hate the ones that move across the screen and dim the rest of the site behind it. By all means, try and encourage people to sign up to your newsletter on your website, but not in an ‘in your face’ way.
4. Flashing & Animated Images
I also hate visiting sites that have endless flashing and moving images – after a few seconds they really start to annoy me and all I want to do is move to another page or away from the site completely. The same goes for audio that automatically starts when a web page loads. Don’t put off visitors with awful flashing graphics, you’ll just send them to your competitors and if you must have audio, and least let the visitor decide whether or not they want to listen to it.
No doubt I’ll be back with more website crimes soon, but we’d love to hear some of the web ‘crimes’ you’ve come across!
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
Oh, don’t get me started! How about:
- auto-start music or (worse) an auto-start audio welcome message
- no way of contacting except via a web form
- ‘customer service’ button which takes you to a FAQ
- spelling/punctuation mistakes (particularly the commonly abused ‘its’/'it’s')
You could do a ‘Top 100′ on this!
Grumpy Old Woman
I decided to stop after 4 as the blog post would have gone on and on! Yes, all of yours are particularly irritating, and I forgot those awful redirects, when you click to a page, are redirected to another and then can’t go back with the back button as it keeps redirecting you! I’ll update the post with more ‘web crimes’ soon!