How To Keep People Away From Your Website - part 1 - Get Articles by Jonathan Harbaugh |  |
> Get Articles > Site Stickiness - Getting Repeat Visitors > How To Keep People Away From Your Website - part 1 How To Keep People Away From Your Website - part 1 Download as PDFJonathan Harbaugh articlesprowebsitemanagement.com PRO Website Management http://www.prowebsitemanagement.com Having a problem getting visitors to your website and keeping them there? Here are a few things you may be doing. LARGE GRAPHICS sarcasm Visitors to your site are willing to spend at least 5 minutes waiting for all your graphics to load. /sarcasm You have to remember that not everybody has fast internet access. People with modems might not consider it worth their time to wait for 20-30 images to load. Make sure that your images are all optimized to be as small as possible in size. I was at a site recently, where I thought the server was really slow at loading images. Well, it was actually trying to load a 900kb bmp image! An image like that with a graphics editor could be reduced to much less than 100kb. UNDER CONSTRUCTION SIGNS sarcasm An Under Construction Website gives your visitors the impression that you are hard at work on the website. /sarcasm When I first set up a small homepage in Geocities back in about '96, I thought it was cute to put "This Homepage is Under Construction". It wasn't much of a problem, considering it was a personal site, and the year was 1996. Nowadays, something like that is an immediate turn-away for people. They don't want to check out an 'Under Construction' website. Why waste their time when they don't know what links might be dead or not? COUNTERS sarcasm Counters are a great way to inform people that they are visitor number 000039! /sarcasm Counters were popular a few years ago. Counters are still used on some personal homepages, but should never be used on a business website that wants to look professional. Either your visitor will think that you receive very few visitors, in which case.. why should I be here? Or, the numbers will be high, and most visitors will scoff at the numbers. If you are going to use counters, make them invisible. LAST UPDATED sarcasm Yes, you want everybody to know that you haven't updated your website in at least 3 weeks or more! /sarcasm Suppose you go on vacation. People won't know that you are on vacation, they'll just think that you aren't doing anything with the website. Unless you update your website every day, don't tell your visitors. MIDI FILES sarcasm There is nothing quite like a loud blaring Midi that blasts you out of your chair in shock. /sarcasm Unless your purpose is to scare people, or it's a personal website, avoid all Midi files. Remember some people are using computers in public places, and although a person may have headphones, a Midi file can be quite annoying. On one occasion, I fell out of my chair. I hadn't noticed that my speakers had gotten turned up, way up. I had some humor page open up, and *BAM* this loud cheesy music started playing. But for a few seconds, it didn't sound like loud cheesy music. It sounded like a farm full of pigs being attacked by dinosaurs. Please, for the health of your visitors, avoid Midi files. If you are totally set on using Midi files on your website, then have the decency of giving people a way to turn it off. Be sure to stay tune for part 2. ========================================================== About the author Jonathan Harbaugh is the webmaster of PRO Website Management. http://www.prowebsitemanagement.com His latest free ebook, Website Traffic Demolition, is based on these articles, which you can find at: http://www.prowebsitemanagement.com/trafficdemolition.html He also offers a free biweekly newsletter called Awesome Solutions For Webmasters. http://www.prowebsitemanagement.com/awesomesolutions.html How useful did you find this article? This article can be downloaded freely from http://www.get-articles.com and used on your website or in your ezine so long as the author is credited and their resource box left intact. You should not change any links in the article, and where the article is used on a website it's links should be clickable. Please see our terms and conditions page for more information: http://www.get-articles.com/authors-publishers-terms.php |
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