6 Reasons Why Visitors Hate Your Website

Having just finished my Why Your Visitors Love You post, I figured it’s only fair to show the opposite hand. I could have done it in reverse order probably, ending up with love and warm fuzzies, but so it goes. Next time. I promise.

Alright, let’s break into glorious song here and see what it is that really ticks off people when they come to your site.

It’s unreadable – The problem isn’t that your text is too big or too small, unless of course it is too big or small. Honestly, I haven’t run into that much. The problem more usually is the color scheme and what it does to legibility and eye strain.

I know I know, there’s a rainbow of beautiful colors out there, but that’s no reason to use them all. Light blue text on a dark blue background doesn’t work. It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to read and leads to eye strain. It may also lead to utter hatred of your website, but it’s more likely people will leave before they get to that point.

Fancy backgrounds with star bursts, stripes, plaid, faeries, vegetation, a map of the universe…these things just don’t work behind text. You know what does work behind text?

White, that’s what.

The easiest text to read is black text on a white background. Shades of gray or dark hues for text will still work, but only if they’re high contrast. Red with pink is not high contrast. Gray with dark gray is not high contrast. Poor color mixtures can make text “float,” move around or sometimes even pulse. Pulsating text is bad. Actually, pulsating anything on a web page is bad.

It scrolls horizontally – I’ll admit I’ve seen some really well designed sites that scrolled horizontally. A couple of them even blew my socks off. But you know, they were just too awkward, enough so that I never really want to go back to those sites.

I’ll admit this point seemed a bit nitpicky to me and I started to feel like a big fat whiner after I wrote it. But I’m stubborn and was determined to redeem myself, which I did after I found some research that backs this up.

Studies were done regarding head and eye movement, the results of which were pretty overwhelming. Apparently, while at a computer, people don’t actually want to move their heads or eyes too much. One test had text that stretched from the far left to the far right side of the monitor, while a second test had taller thinner passages reminiscent of newspaper columns. In all tests the thinner text won out.

This also opens a current can of worms regarding fixed or liquid web design, which I’m not going to touch for the moment. But take the advice from the previous paragraph regardless of fixed or liquid layouts. Text bodies that are too wide are just less comfortable to read.

By the way, my buddy Mark Boulton has a bunch of typography tutorials at his site, which, by the way, is beautiful. Go check it out and see if he’s heeded the points in this post.

It’s unremarkable – Now, by unremarkable I don’t mean to say that your site has to be chock full of graphics, naked people, Flash animations or eye candy. Far from it. What I do mean is that if your site looks like a thousand other sites, it’s simply going to get less attention.

For example, you can look at the default themes for Blogger and Wordpress sites and see that many users never change the basic default themes. This isn’t to say that you’ve got to be or hire a phenomenal designer and spend hours on a site redesign. But HTML and CSS are easy to learn and there are themes that you can switch to with a click of a button. If you put even just a little attention into your site’s personality, it will reap rewards as far as visitor interest and stickiness are concerned.

If you use a default theme, nobody will hate you, but nobody will love you either. It will just appear that you care less than someone who’s put in a couple hours to customize a headline or navigation scheme.

Again, this opens another can of worms. “Ugly design” is making its rounds amongst the pundits, but I for one don’t buy it. We humans like beauty. We like aesthetics. We buy fancy cars (or hope to), date attractive people (or hope to), buy nice houses and listen to nice music. Ugly design may be a trend right now, if for no other reason than it’s different. But it’s not gonna last much longer, and when the trend is over people will go back to liking professionalism and beauty. Not that they ever stopped.

It doesn’t contain what it should – Search engine trickery is an evil, and not a necessary one. Lots of rich rich people would argue with me on this one but I couldn’t care less. People use search engines to find something they’re looking for, and if you’re mechanically swaying search engine results in some fashion to gain visitors or boost revenue you’re not helping anyone.

Pages loaded with AdSense or other advertisements, pages that are stuffed with keywords that may or may not apply…these things don’t help your site at all. The proper way to design a webpage is to make one page of your site be about one thing. Sure, put some keywords in it so Google et al. can read it and index it properly, but don’t overdo it to the point where the writing is stilted and awkward.

It’s hard to navigate – This includes websites with too little, too much or just plain old broken navigation. If I can’t figure out in a fraction of a second how to get around your site, I’ll do something that I DO know how to do: hit the back button.

When I say too much navigation, this could include a couple things. One type of “too much” is when there’s a top navigation bar, a sidebar, links within the text, etc. All this text floating around, all these links…it’s too much to read. There’s a rule of thumb in marketing that actually applies here:

If you give your customer too many choices, he won’t make a decision at all.

The navigation should highlight the major portions of the site and almost act like teasers. Break the site down into obvious appropriate sections that are labeled with catchy titles and captions. Then make the sub-sections easy to find as well. If you do this and it’s obvious to your visitor how to get around, they’ll go as deep as they want into your site.

Graphical navigation is another type of “too much.” You’ve seen what I’m talking about: lollipops that link back to the home page, birds that lead to a contact form, etc. I think you can get away with showing an icon of a house to link to the home page, or an icon of an envelope that links to the contact page. Other than those, icons can be ambiguous. If you must use icons, make sure they’re self-explanatory and/or are accompanied by meaningful text.

As to broken links, if I encounter a 404 Error (”Page Not Found”) on your site I’ll check once to make sure it wasn’t my own spelling error or a burp of my browser or your server. I might even hit “refresh” once, but if it turns out to be just poor site planning or a broken link on the webmaster’s part, I’ve just lost a bit of patience. It’s sort of like your doctor not showing up for an appointment or the mechanic forgetting to put the lug nuts back on your hubs.

It’s slow – This is the Age of Broadband, the technical definition of which is probably “that which was invented to help impatient people tolerate the internet.” If you’ve got so many graphics and widgets in your page that it’s slow, people aren’t going to wait around. There are bazillions of web pages around that aren’t slow. Keep the KB count of your web pages low. And note that I said KB, not MB. If you don’t know what KBs and MBs are, your webpages might be too big.

That wraps it up, at least for now. I thought of a million other no-nos while writing this, but they’ll live to fight another day.

I’d love to hear from you on these points, and any others you want to bring up. They might even find their way into future posts.

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