What to do with your website to lose my attention.

Poor organization

The organization of a website can rarely just be thrown together at the last minute; with the best of websites, their organizational structure is well thought through long before the site is put together. A poorly organized website will lead visitors away from, or down an indirect path towards, the pages they’re looking for. A poorly organized website groups pages together in unexpected ways or forces unintuitive mechanisms for searching, filtering or performing other actions on the site’s content. Here are some of the most egregious ways in which poor organization is often found:

 1. Don’t tell me what to do (Call to action)

Your first time visitor is either coming upon your site without any prior knowledge as to what your company does, or they know exactly what your company does and are looking for specific information. The first type of visitor wants to know what your website and your company offers and wants to know it fast. Your homepage should have a call to action, whether that’s clicking through to an order page, finding out more information about the most popular product(s), or enticing people to contact you by email or telephone for a quote or meeting. This way the visitor is guided towards information about your company and how to proceed with purchasing a product, getting in touch or finding out more information.

 2. Can’t find what I want

The second type of first-time visitor has come to your site to satisfy a need, that could be the completion of a purchase or to retrieve some information. The organization of the site must lend itself to helping these visitors find what they want. If you have a product list, ensure that list is searchable or categorized and linked to from the homepage in an obvious manner. If your site is for articles on a variety of topics, make sure those articles are on the homepage and the most common topics are categorized somewhere in plain site. No matter the purpose, there will always be 1-5 reasons why your top intentional visitors land on your site. Make sure you cater your homepage to those exact reasons, otherwise you’ll miss out on that business.

 3. Broken Links

Broken links are killer to the credibility of your site. Not only do they make it look like you’re inattentive but it makes people move on pretty fast. If you aren’t paying enough attention to your own site to ensure your links work, then why would your visitors pay attention? We use a great WordPress plugin, appropriately named Broken Link Checker, to check for these and ensure they are non-existent. You should too!

Make me wait

If you have an intro page or something blocking access to your site, then you better have a good reason for it. In other words flash intros (more on this later), splash pages, pop-ups that block access to your site are just about always a no-no.

You might think that if a massive portion of your visitors are looking for one particular item and care very little about the rest, then why not have a splash page for that product or put up a giant pop-up when visitors first arrive? If your visitors aren’t interested in the rest of your site, then why do you have it there? This leads back to poor organization above. You should instead re-organization your site to strip out all the useless portions and focus the layout entirely on that one item that everyone is looking for rather than try to do both.

Another way in which you can force your visitors to wait is by hosting your site on a poorly maintained server, or by using inefficient code. If your site’s pages take longer than a few seconds to load, you better call someone in to investigate and fix the issue.

Never make a visitor wait. These days, people can’t seem to focus on any one thing for longer than a few seconds and your website is not an exception. Keep things moving fast and it will help you generate the business you need.

Use a difficult to read font (e.g.: Comic Sans)

I’m sure there’s plenty of places where using cursive or otherwise fancy fonts is acceptable. Headings on niche websites with cursive fonts, perhaps with a comic-book like feel or a font that makes up your logo text, can lend itself to the style of your site. However, when the page has anything to do with sales or ensuring your visitors can comprehend your content, never use a font that is difficult to read. This leads back to the last attention loser: making your visitor wait. If they have a tough time reading your content, then they’ll pause while reading through your content and thus, are ‘waiting’ in a certain form. They’ll also likely get frustrated trying to read it. Do not let this happen.

Tip: only use cursive fonts for headings and only when you absolutely have to in order to match the style of the site. 90% of websites will not benefit from custom heading fonts.

Auto-start media

Even if you’re a radio station, don’t have a video or audio presentation begin upon arrival at the site. YouTube and Vimeo, two of the largest video sites on the Internet do not start playing immediately upon arrival, except when someone purposefully links directly to a video. In other words, media only ever starts playing automatically when their visitor is expecting it. They do this for a reason – media that starts automatically is both distracting and annoying.

If your visitor was playing music already when they arrive at your site, then the double-sourced audio cacophony is irritating and grating. It will ruin your site in the mind of the visitor. If your visitor left their speakers on high volume and was not listening to anything before arrival, they will be startled by your sudden audio and become irritated. On the flip-side, if your visitor doesn’t have their speakers on, then why bother starting the media early?

When your visitors land on your site and see the option to play your video or music, then they will turn on their speakers and start playing it. Don’t force it down their throats.

One exception to this rule is with auto-start muted video; you may automatically start a video without any audio. Often this is only useful in ads, however you may have some video footage that don’t require the audio to get the point across. Go ahead and use it!

Not delivering the content that I expect. (searched keywords vs on-site content)

If your visitors are looking for one thing and expect your site to bring it to them, but you actually have nothing of the sort, you better get working on that. Either provide the visitor with what they actually want, or change-up your keywords. A good example of this is with error messages. Ever got an error message and searched it to see if anyone else has a solution? Finding many sites with others complaining about the issue and no solution is a piss-off every time.

Use Flash in almost any way

The use of Adobe Flash on a website is a really bad idea in just about every case. Not only does Flash often make more intensive use of your CPU than intensive 3D games, heat up devices, and lower the battery life of every mobile device in existence, it also simply doesn’t work on any Apple portable. If your visitors have an iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch, your site is completely inaccessible to them and with millions of these devices sold every year, the number of visitors using one of these devices is only going to increase.

Already have flash on your website? There are solutions! Replace your flash with Javascript or HTML5 alternatives. There are plenty of them out there now and while they may not work with ancient browsers like Internet Explorer 6, in a few years time that won’t matter anyway; you will be building your site for the future. Why build your site on technology that benefits stragglers on the internet today when you will simply have to recreate the site tomorrow for future technology? Instead, take the opposite approach; build your site using the standards of the future so that when everyone catches up, your site looks better than ever and you won’t have to change a thing to make that happen. You can do this by ensuring the site works perfectly on an iPad or by using a flash blocker in the latest version of Google Chrome. Most of the HTML5 and Javascript options that I’ve used have great fall-backs that allow the functionality to continue to work on older browsers anyway, and you don’t have to do anything to make that happen!

Examples of common uses of Flash that should be phased out:

• sIFR text/font replacement
• Flash website intros
• Flash video format (even YouTube and Vimeo have an HTML5 version of every video posted in the past half-decade)
• Flex built websites. Many companies are now building their entire back-end control panels with HTML5 and Javascript. No need for Flex!
• Flash animated headers
• Pretty much any use of Flash on a website that isn’t for actual animating, like games. (Although games can now be done with WebGL!)