How to Create a Really Bad Website and Frustrate Your Visitors
By Jason O'Connor
If you're a sadistic kind of webmaster or website owner and have a burning desire to
royally frustrate and anger your site visitors each and every time they visit your site,
these three lists are just for you. If you want to have a terrible website that looks bad,
works horribly and breaks fundamental marketing rules, read on.
First let me explain why there are three lists. One way to look at any website is to
break it up into three equally important segments; design, technical and marketing. In
other words, every site on the Web contains these three components.
They all have a design or look and feel (design), they all have to be on a server and
coded properly to be live on the Internet (technical) and they all have ways in which
they attract visitors and make sales (marketing).
Let's look at the top ten ways in which you can annoy your website visitors and
basically fail miserably at the whole website endeavor in each of the three segments.
The following is a list, broken up into the three categories, defining exactly what NOT
to do.
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes:
1. Never use Web conventions, instead use crazy and wacky formats that no one's ever
seen and no one can understand
2. Write trite, predictable, boring or copied content only and never updating your site.
3. Create totally different and unique navigation for every page so that your visitors
need to waste time re-learning your navigation every time they go to a new
page. Also create totally different look & feels for every page so that your visitors
never know if they're on the same site or clicked away.
4. Use confusing, obfuscated and mysterious labels for all your links and buttons so
that no one ever has any idea where they're going if they click. The more confusing, the
better.
5. Make it impossible to search the site. Offering no search box, no site map and
basically no possible way to find anything on your website.
6. Include content that only talks about you. Never mentioning anything about your
visitors or how you can help them, just talk about you and your history and all your
achievements. Including a big picture of you and your office building right on the
home page.
7. Include only poorly-written copy with lots of grammar mistakes, and ubiquitous,
curious and horrendous spelling and punctuation mistakes throughout your site.
8. Don't include any text. Making every page on your site one big picture. So for
instance, on your home page have one giant picture of you and your office building
and have no text so search engines can't see your site at all.
9. Use buttons for your navigation only, or use complicated JavaScript drop down
menus that complicate your sites navigation. Either way, if you do this and include no
text links, the search engines won't be able to spider (navigate and record) your
website.
10. Make your site as difficult to read as possible. Use teeny, tiny fonts that are hard to
read against some funky-colored background. For instance, use blue fonts on a
black background.
Top 10 Technical Mistakes:
1.Make your website take forever to load in people's browsers. The longer the better.
2. Make it so that your site looks completely different on everybody's computer. So
for Macs your site looks like one way, and for PCs it looks another way. Or having it
look totally different in Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox.
3. Make it so that any functionality on the site is confusing to figure out and works
improperly and inconsistently every time it's used.
4. Include lots of broken links and missing images throughout.
5. Set it up so that it regularly crashes. For example, if more than three people are
visiting the site at the same time, the home page becomes inaccessible.
6. Have no form validation. Allowing visitors to enter any thing under the sun into
your website forms. Maybe some smart hacker-types will enter executable code that
corrupts
or takes over your server.
7. Make all your site visitors have to download and install lots of plug-ins to view
your site properly. If they don't, too bad.
8. Tell people that they have to view your site in a specific browser and browser
version only.
9. Make it so that there are tons of pop-ups, move newsletter sign-up boxes, running
videos, animations and Flash movies that take forever to download before you can
view the site.
10. Use lots of frames.
Top Ten E-Marketing Mistakes:
1. Make your website completely bounce-friendly. In other words, make it 'un-sticky'
so that when people arrive on one of your pages, they leave immediately
2. Includes no calls to action so that your site never asks your website visitors to do a
thing. Making it so that every page is a dead end that leaves your visitors scratching
their heads and then clicking away.
3. Does absolutely nothing to build your brand
4. Has no terms or policies page
5. Evokes no emotions. Making your site flat, boring, gray, dull and forgettable.
6. Make sure there is no way for anyone who visits your site to sign up for anything
or give you their contact info or email address. Certainly don't use your site to build
any kind of email list.
7. Convert absolutely no one who visits your site into a paying customer. Ever.
8. Include no phone number, email and absolutely no other way to contact you. Hide
behind your website.
9. Never use any kind of an analytics program like Google Analytics or Web Trends
and never measuring or even looking at your website activity.
10. Make it so that search engine can't read your site and make it so that people can't
really read your site either.
Follow these three lists perfectly and you'll be well on your way to having a bad and
useless website and frustrating and angering everyone who visits.
About the author: Jason OConnor owns and operates Oak Web Works, LLC and writes Net
Gazette, periodic, free web design and marketing newsletter.
By Jason O'Connor
If you're a sadistic kind of webmaster or website owner and have a burning desire to
royally frustrate and anger your site visitors each and every time they visit your site,
these three lists are just for you. If you want to have a terrible website that looks bad,
works horribly and breaks fundamental marketing rules, read on.
First let me explain why there are three lists. One way to look at any website is to
break it up into three equally important segments; design, technical and marketing. In
other words, every site on the Web contains these three components.
They all have a design or look and feel (design), they all have to be on a server and
coded properly to be live on the Internet (technical) and they all have ways in which
they attract visitors and make sales (marketing).
Let's look at the top ten ways in which you can annoy your website visitors and
basically fail miserably at the whole website endeavor in each of the three segments.
The following is a list, broken up into the three categories, defining exactly what NOT
to do.
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes:
1. Never use Web conventions, instead use crazy and wacky formats that no one's ever
seen and no one can understand
2. Write trite, predictable, boring or copied content only and never updating your site.
3. Create totally different and unique navigation for every page so that your visitors
need to waste time re-learning your navigation every time they go to a new
page. Also create totally different look & feels for every page so that your visitors
never know if they're on the same site or clicked away.
4. Use confusing, obfuscated and mysterious labels for all your links and buttons so
that no one ever has any idea where they're going if they click. The more confusing, the
better.
5. Make it impossible to search the site. Offering no search box, no site map and
basically no possible way to find anything on your website.
6. Include content that only talks about you. Never mentioning anything about your
visitors or how you can help them, just talk about you and your history and all your
achievements. Including a big picture of you and your office building right on the
home page.
7. Include only poorly-written copy with lots of grammar mistakes, and ubiquitous,
curious and horrendous spelling and punctuation mistakes throughout your site.
8. Don't include any text. Making every page on your site one big picture. So for
instance, on your home page have one giant picture of you and your office building
and have no text so search engines can't see your site at all.
9. Use buttons for your navigation only, or use complicated JavaScript drop down
menus that complicate your sites navigation. Either way, if you do this and include no
text links, the search engines won't be able to spider (navigate and record) your
website.
10. Make your site as difficult to read as possible. Use teeny, tiny fonts that are hard to
read against some funky-colored background. For instance, use blue fonts on a
black background.
Top 10 Technical Mistakes:
1.Make your website take forever to load in people's browsers. The longer the better.
2. Make it so that your site looks completely different on everybody's computer. So
for Macs your site looks like one way, and for PCs it looks another way. Or having it
look totally different in Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox.
3. Make it so that any functionality on the site is confusing to figure out and works
improperly and inconsistently every time it's used.
4. Include lots of broken links and missing images throughout.
5. Set it up so that it regularly crashes. For example, if more than three people are
visiting the site at the same time, the home page becomes inaccessible.
6. Have no form validation. Allowing visitors to enter any thing under the sun into
your website forms. Maybe some smart hacker-types will enter executable code that
corrupts
or takes over your server.
7. Make all your site visitors have to download and install lots of plug-ins to view
your site properly. If they don't, too bad.
8. Tell people that they have to view your site in a specific browser and browser
version only.
9. Make it so that there are tons of pop-ups, move newsletter sign-up boxes, running
videos, animations and Flash movies that take forever to download before you can
view the site.
10. Use lots of frames.
Top Ten E-Marketing Mistakes:
1. Make your website completely bounce-friendly. In other words, make it 'un-sticky'
so that when people arrive on one of your pages, they leave immediately
2. Includes no calls to action so that your site never asks your website visitors to do a
thing. Making it so that every page is a dead end that leaves your visitors scratching
their heads and then clicking away.
3. Does absolutely nothing to build your brand
4. Has no terms or policies page
5. Evokes no emotions. Making your site flat, boring, gray, dull and forgettable.
6. Make sure there is no way for anyone who visits your site to sign up for anything
or give you their contact info or email address. Certainly don't use your site to build
any kind of email list.
7. Convert absolutely no one who visits your site into a paying customer. Ever.
8. Include no phone number, email and absolutely no other way to contact you. Hide
behind your website.
9. Never use any kind of an analytics program like Google Analytics or Web Trends
and never measuring or even looking at your website activity.
10. Make it so that search engine can't read your site and make it so that people can't
really read your site either.
Follow these three lists perfectly and you'll be well on your way to having a bad and
useless website and frustrating and angering everyone who visits.
About the author: Jason OConnor owns and operates Oak Web Works, LLC and writes Net
Gazette, periodic, free web design and marketing newsletter.
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