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1. Too Many Ads. When you're trying to make money from your website, it's all too easy to try to fit in more ads than you really should, or start using ad formats that are too intrusive. If you've put a new ad on your site, go to the site as if you were a visitor, and ask yourself honestly: is this just too much? 2. Plugin Overload. You've got to keep media that uses plugins to a strict maximum of one per page: that means that if you've got Flash, then you can't have a media player, or if you're using Java then you can't have Flash. It's not as bad to use the same plugin twice, however. 3. Flash Intros. Please, don't use a Flash intro on your website. You'd think everyone would realise they're a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don't seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don't be one of those people. 4. Unclear Layout and Navigation. Many websites, especially business sites, seem to suffer from some kind of disease where even the very simplest task takes ten steps to achieve. If people are emailing you to ask you how to do things on your site, then you need to improve your layout and navigation. Remember: if there are certain tasks people seem to want to do more often, put them on the front page. 5. No Marking for External Links. There are two kinds of links: internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other websites). For the benefit of your visitors, though, it's best if you mark external links, either by making them a different colour or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the usual one). It's also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren't leaving your site altogether when they click them. 6. Unclear Linking. You might think it looks better to only show links when people put their mouse over them, or not make their colour stand out too much from the rest of the text, but it's not - while it might make the design look nicer, it makes it far less usable. Use a clearly contrasting colour for links, and preferably underline them. 7. Unlabelled Email Links. It's a very bad idea to ever use a link that will send email (a mailto link) without clearly marking it with the word 'email'. If you just make clicking people's names send email, you'll annoy visitors who just clicked wanting to find out more about the person. 8. Broken Links. You've got to check all your links regularly to make sure that they all still work. There's nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn't been updated in years and none of the links work any more. Yes, a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doesn't mean that you should neglect the essential maintenance it needs from time to time. 9. Strange Fonts. Stick to the most common web fonts: that's pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. If you're using more obscure fonts, then most visitors probably won't have them - and the ones that do will find your text hard to read. The only time you should use non-standard fonts is in your logo or in headings, if they are displayed as an image.
10. Badly-sized Text. It's important to keep your text around the standard size (preferably just below). Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many visitors. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's preferred text size. You might also consider offering buttons on your site to decrease or increase the size.
Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no? Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that?I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site. This strategy never makes me a passionate user. What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content. So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal. Welcome Googler, let us help you outHere we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that
What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site. Placement etc.We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too). We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)? As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. Small Business Website Design Guide Many small business owners, who still don't have websites for their businesses, now are going to enter WWW marketplace. Although there are many various web design and development services offered by companies but sometimes it's not easy to decide what exactly is needed. Usually small businesses web sites are of brochure type and mostly contain information about the company and products or services it offers. The web site is dedicated to help building business relationship with potential partner… 2. IS YOUR WEB SITE UNFRIENDLY? Part 9 of 9 Other 'unfriendly' things often found on web sites are:1 'Blinking' text--fortunately not so common these days.2 Words marching across the page.3 Words marching across the status bar at the bottom ofthe browser. That's where I want to see the URL of the linkat which my mouse is pointing, for goodness' sake!These gimmicks, along with animated graphics, are extremelydistracting, especially to the eyes of visitors who are muchmore interested in what the owner of the web site has tosay.SUMMING UP:We… 3. What's Wrong With My Website? By Michael Southon I ask myself that question about once a month.My website looks fine to me, but what are otherpeople seeing? And what are the Search Enginesseeing? Here's a checklist of 10 ways to optimizeyour website for peak performance:1. Browser CompatibilityThe first thing is to look at your website throughother people's browsers. I do this regularly and I'vesometimes been shocked at what I saw!ANYBROWSERhttp://www.anybrowser.com2. Broken LinksAbout 5% of all links on the Internet are broken. Asite that c… 4. Perfection and Practicality. Get The Site You Want Without Going Overboard It's a common belief that in order to be successful in any field,one must strive for perfection. Although this is a nobleintention we must be wary of the fact that the pursuit ofperfection in design can, in come cases, cause more harm thangood. When working with a designer on a project, it's importantnot to let the pursuit of perfection disrupt a deadline or pushyou over budget. How can you avoid the perfection trap andstill achieve the design you're looking for? Simple...1) Be Realistic. It's i… |
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