Tue
17
If the headline itself didn’t give you a heads-up, this is a tongue-in-cheek guide to what NOT to do. Following these tips is an almost sure-fire way for your site to be less user-friendly, less understandable, and more likely to make your visitors finally throw their hands up in disgust and find another business.
- Make a background with lots of moving features and crazy colors that distract from the text on the page. If it’s almost impossible to read the text, that’s even better. After all, why would you want visitors to be able to read what your site is about?
- Make sure your website is packed with huge image files, especially if they don’t really relate to the topic of the site at all. This will make your site take forever to load, which will give your readers the perfect opportunity to relax after already struggling to read your text.
- IF YOU THINK A SENTENCE OR IDEA IS REALLY IMPORTANT, PUT IT IN ALL CAPS. BETTER YET, PUT THE ENTIRE PARAGRAPH IN ALL CAPS. THIS ISN’T DISTRACTING OR ANNOYING AT ALL, AND WILL NOT MAKE IT SEEM LIKE YOU ARE YELLING AT YOUR READERS.
- Link random words so that visitors aren’t exactly sure where they’ll be taken once they click it. It sure does look nice, though, doesn’t it? It’s even better if you don’t keep your links up to date, so when visitors click the link they get a nice error message.
- Don’t worry about making your site concise and able to fit on a standard browser window with only vertical scrolling. Visitors are patient enough to scroll all over the place to find what they’re looking for, especially if the screen is cluttered up with annoyingI mean interestinggraphics and animations.
Follow these easy steps and watch your site crash and burn. Or, do the exact opposite, and you’ll be on your way to a site people actually want to visit.
