Three Common Ways To Annoy Your Visitors.
By Rik Tairea

There are hundreds of ways to annoy visitors to your site and keep them away - FOREVER. As a webmaster of a website award program, and as a web surfer I have come across many pages that have managed to keep me around for 10 seconds and then make sure that I never visit again (which I'm sure has happen to you as well). Here are three commonly used ways to really annoy your visitors.

"Multiple Popups/Popunders"

Now don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against popup or popunder windows. When used properly they can be the best way to put your message across and gain subscribers for a newsletter. I don't even mind visiting sites that have popups to pay for free hosting (geocities, tripod, fortune city, etc) but when you have to endure 3 to 4 popups/unders on one page it can be annoying and terribly frustrating.

To take it even further, some popups/unders can come with no title bars and no window borders. I have even seen cases where these pop-ups manage to go into full screen mode and the only way to close them is by pressing ALT-F4.

The problem with multiple popups/unders is that they get in the way of the actual content. If I'm spending too much time trying to close windows, I'm just going to get frustrated and leave the site, provided I haven't closed the main window by accident in the first place.

Another problem with multiple popups/unders is that they can take up substantial bandwidth and thus slow down the load time of the actual website. Studies show that the attention span of an average web surfer is not terribly good, so you only have a limited amount of time to capture your audience in order to keep them around longer.

If you are going to use popups/unders on your website then try and use them sparingly and to your advantage.

"Splash Pages"

Like popups/unders, if used wisely can actually add to a website. But for some webmasters, the temptation to go overboard while creating a splash page and, in some cases splash pages is too great. We've all seen them, some may look great but take forever to load while others just plain old look ugly and serve no purpose what so ever.

Then there are pages that display flash presentations that take 3 - 5 minutes to load and 30 seconds to watch. Now don't get me wrong (again), I don't hate flash (but I don't particularly like it either) but it can be a big pain in the (insert your expletive here). Disadvantages include loading time, having to download a plug-in if you don't have it already installed, and in some cases not being able to get past the front page.

Here's a scenario for you (if for some reason you are reading this aloud then take a deep breath because I have purposely refrained from using any punctuation for dramatic effect). If there is no skip intro or alternative link to get into the main page of the website and if the visitor doesn't have the plug-in or has flash disabled and the page designer has not written statements that redirect a visitor to the main page if the flash file does not load then where does the visitor go from there? Nuff said.

"Bad Color Schemes"

In my opinion the look of a webpage doesn't really matter, the viewability (if that's a word) does. Put it this way, if a visitor is having a hard time viewing your content then what's the point?

Don't you just love it when you visit a webpage that has a black background with dark blue text, or better yet a webpage with a bright yellow (and I mean YELLOW) background with very bright red text that is able to make you squint your eyes so hard that suddenly you to go into a seizure, fall off your chair and foam at the mouth.

Ok, maybe I'm being a little over dramatic (just a little bit) but I have seen webpages like this many times before (and have managed to hurt my eyes). So if this happens what do you think my next action will be? Do you think I'll take some pain killers and carry on looking at the offending webpage in question? You guessed it - NO! (unless the content will either save my life or create world peace). I'll be heading to another website more user friendly to my fragile needs.

Have you ever noticed that the most used background and text color combinations for webpages are white/black and black/white. There's a good reason for this - THEY ARE EASY ON THE EYES!

"Remember"

Like I said before, there are hundreds (and I mean HUNDREDS) of ways to turn visitors away and make sure that they never return to your website. When your creating your webpages just remember this - think about whether or not what your creating will turn away your visitors, if you think yes then decide on another course of action.

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The above article was written solely for Groundzero and may not be reproduced in anyway on print or other media. This article was written by the webmaster, creator and owner of this site.
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