Ten ways to really annoy your web site visitors

It's very easy to build a bad web site, but it's not difficult to avoid some of the common mistakes. Build a better web site by avoiding these pitfalls!

Over the past years, the Marketing Magic team have reported on many sites who have requested our web site appraisal service. We have seen some excellent sites - and some rather poor ones. We're not suggesting that any one site has commited all the errors below. But here are some common features we've observed that can really annoy visitors:

1. Have little else on your Home page but a huge image map or a Flash movie, which takes for ever to download and makes it just a little difficult to use if the visitor is surfing with graphics turned off (as about 25% do).
2. Always make people return to your home page to see another page - especially if you've committed error #1
3. Put a link into one of your pages, and then have nothing there but a large 'Under Construction' image.
4. Have nothing on your site but page after page after page of hard-sell material, with nothing of interest unless people really want to buy - immediately.
5. Use a dark blue patterned background and dark green text. Make your visitors have to work really hard to read your words of wisdom.
6. Use white text on a dark background for information which your visitor may want to print out and retain. The printed results are very clear - not!
7. Use frames for Netscape Natigator 2.0 visitors - and no alternative for anyone else. It's a good way to lose at least half of your potential customers.
8. Put all of your text in large headlines.
9. Make sure that it's really difficult for your visitors to contact you - like no email address and just one complicated form on a separate page.
10. Fill up your home page with logos of all the awards that your site has won.

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