Here are five things you ‘could’ do on your site, but they are five things you shouldn’t.
- Put music on your site that plays automatically – Have you even been at a department store and picked up an item that started playing music? People turn and stare and no matter what the tune is, you wish it would stop. Maybe you haven’t but I’m betting someone has. Think twice about putting music on your site that plays automatically – you’re probably ruining your image by making someone feel embarrassed, mad or simply irritated.
- Make site visitors fill out long forms – Getting information from your customers is good, but wasting their time isn’t. Studies show that people don’t like to give out their information to strangers – remember what your mommy taught you? Shorter forms will get filled out, longer forms are abandoned.
- Hide your contact info – Remember that site that made you click through TEN PAGES to find the business’ phone number so you could call them and ask how late they’re open tonight? Do your visitors a favor and place contact and brick-and-mortar information (like your Hours of Operation) in a prominent location on your site – like maybe the header or footer of every page.
- Make large videos a critical part of the design of your site – Those videos explaining the product and seamlessly integrated on the home page sure look good. But when you put them on the website, the files are so huge even a user on a fast connection has to wait 2 minutes for the page to load – and they’re usually off on another Google search to find someone else’s site long before then! You usually don’t need to explain your product in a 3-minute video. A if you do, a better format might be just an embedded video window that the user can click to play. And remember the advice above about having audio start as soon as the user lands on your site? *tsk tsk tsk*
- Make important info available only via a downloadable PDF – Boy, it sure is convenient for you to list your goods, services, or menu items in a PDF for people to download (especially if your prices or menu changes often), but your customers just want to see what you’ve got. It took a lot of energy to get customers to visit your site. Don’t waste their time and energy. Think about all the steps your user has to take to see your menu – an extra click to download, then they have to FIND where the file downloaded on their computer, and then it takes another double click to open the PDF – why are you making your customers do all this extra work? List your menu options directly on your site prominently under a Menu or Food page. List your products on your site, nicely categorized and even better, searchable. This also makes them indexable by Google which is always a good thing. In today’s “instant gratification” society – give your customers what they want, before they go to a competitor that does.