So we’ve all been there and we pretty much universally hate pop up ads. Nothing is more annoying than trying to read something or look at something on a website when suddenly “Pop” up comes an ad that you barely look at, all you’re looking for is the X to make it go away. Sometimes you’ll persevere with the website at any rate, but a second pop-up almost certainly will send you running. So if your site is using them STOP NOW – it isn’t worth the loss in traffic to possibly marginally increase the sign-ups to your newsletter.

There are far more effective and less invasive in-site advert triggers that might work far better for you. Something like a slide-in call to action or an exit module which will trigger when someone goes to leave your website, giving you that one chance to catch them before they go. Possibly keeping them on the website that little bit longer, that little extra nudge to prompt them into giving you their details.

If someone is enjoying what they thought was a silent browsing period, perhaps they’re in the office or on their phone in a public place, what do you think they’re going to do if your page loads and suddenly they’re blasted at full volume with your theme song or a talking video which they didn’t click play on or can’t locate the stop button on? Well, they’re going to leave, they might fumble for the mute button but the “back” button on the browser is far easier to find – and quicker too.

They’ll leave, they’re gone and you’ve lost that visitor. Let people click on the media on your site, let them choose to play it, don’t force them to.

When you first land on a site anything that is moving, loading or animated will draw the eye. If that particular thing isn’t something you want people to focus on – get rid of it. However even if precisely the reason you had it put on your site in the first place was to draw the eye – they’re still something most people who browse websites say they don’t like. The reasons given vary but the overriding one is that they’re not something that people are expecting to see on a website, therefore they feel incongruous and put people off, more subtly than others on this list but still, it came in third – so it’s obviously a big enough reason for people leaving websites.

Imagery is very important in the overall experience of your website, however if someone has landed on your website and finds an image like the one shown here, are they really going to think that these people work in your company? Are they going to assume everyone is so happy to be in a board meeting and that you had a professional photographer come into your office, sit in on meetings and take gems such as this image for you to use on your website? The answer is, most likely “no” to all of them. So don’t use them.

A “contact us” form may seem like a helpful way to allow customers to contact you whilst at the same time creating your very own contact list from the entered details. But it is actually the least valuable source of data and lead generation on your website. It is usually used for one-off contact, not as a starting point to ongoing communications.

But why just have the contact form on your site and not put in your phone number, office address, email address for direct emails and other methods of contacting you – your Facebook and other social media links, so they have multiple contact channel options for reaching you. They don’t want their only option to be filling out a form and wondering when, if ever, they’ll hear back from you. Statistics show that contact pages that contain nothing more than a form are an actual reason given for people leaving the website and looking elsewhere.

If you’ve ever been looking for a product or service that is a bit technical and when you find a website for a company that seems like they deliver it, the about us page or worse – the whole site – is full of techno babble!

Take what we do as an example. If our explanation of what we do read something like:

Using mostly PHP and HTML5 along with the occasional addition of Java and JQuery, we produce web-based database algorithms linking with third party API software and OpenSource code to produce a customer-facing digital marketing product for our customers.

Most people would wonder what the hell we were talking about.

We can simplify the above to say: We produce websites, among other digital media, to improve the online marketing of our customer’s businesses. – simple, easy, to the point, effective and most-importantly easy to understand.

So about 10-15 years ago you would often come across a website with reams and reams of copy on each page, actually reading it would reveal it was just crammed with keywords – meant for crawlers, not for humans, making it all but unbearable to read.  Despite the fact that Google’s algorithm is far cleverer these days and can pick up that kind of copy in a nanosecond you still see it and users don’t like it.

On top of that you’ll also get penalised by Google for having copy like that on your site these days. Relevancy is what Google looks for these days, a keyword stuffed page is no good at all. It doesn’t make for good reading – and people will leave.

Now there are two sides to this, the first being that people want a company to have a social media page these days. Why? Well simply put, this is the modern-day testimonials platform, this is where your customers, happy and unhappy, will come to leave their comments on your company. People want to be able to see that you’re on social media, because by being on there it shows you’re not scared of the negative comments a bad company might get inundated with.

Second point, if your site is interesting, useful, helpful and important – people want to share your content on social media – and you want to encourage this! The more you’re shared the better!

Sliders are great for many reasons, not least because they’re a nice way to showcase the different things you do or different things you’ve worked on. They’re also helpful in catching the eye, the 3 second rule applies to websites, so a slider can keep someone on your site for a few moments longer. However, all too often a website loads and a slider loads and takes forever to load. So image one loads, eventually, then image two slides over and you get the loading spinner for ages and ages and… ages.

People don’t bother waiting around, they’ll be off in no time at all.

This is the worst offender of all, it usually happens if you’ve just let a graphic designer loose on your website to create something seriously funky – without the slightest consideration given to the user interface. We use the term about design being as much about function as it is about looks all the time. This is the most important thing, people might be able to look past irritating copy, slow images and auto-playing media if they can at least see the objective of the site and where they have to go.

If they can’t work out what your site is about they’ll be off very fast indeed.

Come talk to us about your website