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Four Really Stupid Things You Can Do With Your Web Site
We've all been to Web sites that we didn't like. In fact, we've been to
Web sites we didn't like so much that we left them and never went back. If you'd like your
site to be one of the top sites that people don't like to visit, here are four really dumb
things you can do to make it work that way.
Design Your Site With Technology Your Visitors Can't Use or Don't Like
Advertising and design people seem to like things that wink and blink and glow and take up
the whole screen to get their message across. That's a vestigial dorsal fin left over from
the television area. Don't succumb.
Most business sites are visited by users with mid-range speed modems on dialup
connections. Design with that in mind.
SUGGESTION: Design your Web site so that it's useable and a good experience with the
current version of the America Online Browser. That will limit your "creativity"
but it will make your site a whole lot more user friendlier.
Interrupt Visitors or Distract Them
Folks come to your Web site with two key objectives. They either want to solve a problem,
or answer a question. Anything that keeps them from doing that is stupid.
Try this rule. If it moves, if it blinks, if it interrupts, or if it splits the screen, it
had better have a good positive purpose or it's probably firmly in the stupid column.
SUGGESTION: If you feel you must use some of the more technologically advanced features,
such as animations, frames, audio, or video, make them optional for users who want them,
not mandatory. And, if you do that, stay away from language on your site which says things
like, "you'd be able to see this really important stuff if only you were smart enough
to have the right browser."
Design the Site from Your Perspective
Hey, just because you think it's important doesn't mean your visitors will think it's
important. For about a year, one major corporation led off its Web site with a large
picture of the Chairman of the Board and an audio version of one of his 30 minute
speeches.
Now, folks at that corporation probably care a lot about what the Chairman thinks. After
all, folks at the top of the corporate food chain generally have life and death power (or
at least employed and unemployed power) over those down below them. But most visitors to a
Web site could care less about what the CEO looks like, and even less than that, about a
recent speech of his or hers Especially if it takes up a ton of bandwidth.
Finding out what the perspective of your visitors is doesn't take all that much hard work.
It doesn't even take a massive, expensive, stratified random sample marketing research
project. Instead, talk to the folks who answer your phones and who talk to your customers
and prospects every day.
When you do that, you'll find that there's a basic list of concerns, questions, and
problems that your visitors will show up with. Design your site to deal with those. Answer
the questions. Help them solve the problems. This may not give you the ego gratification
of making your face available to 175 million or so people, but it will increase your
bottom line because your Web site will be one that visitors like and can use to find out
how you can help them.
Design the Site to Require Knowledge of the Company and your Jargon
Now, maybe this is a variant on the last point, but I see it as distinctly different. You,
and everybody who knows your company well including your customers uses a common set of
assumptions and language to talk about what it is that you do. Your visitors may not be
familiar with that language. Use their language, not yours, except on those areas of the
site where you can be sure jargon is OK.
A good rule here is, "don't ab." That means don't abbreviate. If you must
abbreviate, set up a link to a glossary for anyone who needs it.
Just like with the questions and problems issues, listen to the people who are calling you
and talking to you for the first time. The language that they use is the language most of
your Web sites should be put together with.
OK, that's it. The choice is yours. You can design in really stupid stuff, or, if you
choose, you can design a Web site that helps your visitors achieve their objectives and
you fatten up your bottom line.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 12/31/00
Reviewed: 2/15/03
Some of what constitutes "advanced features" has changed, but the basics still hold.
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