Don't be your own Worst Enemy!

What’s stopping you from making sales online? A small advertising budget? Not enough time to effectively promote your site? Fierce competition? Or are you driving your potential customers away?

You’re probably thinking, “Wait a second! Why would I drive my customers away? I want my online business to succeed.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe Web business owners intentionally sabotage their online efforts, BUT there are several things that you may be doing with your site that are (unintentionally) driving visitors - potential customers - away.

I see web sites every day that engage in practices counter- productive to online success. I’m going to detail a few of my “do”s and “don’t”s regarding web design. After you’ve read through the items below, take a good, hard look at your site and make sure you’re not inadvertently being your own worst enemy.

DON’T Make Your Visitors Jump Through Hoops

“Splash” pages with no discernible purpose, requiring visitors to register just to enter your site, burying your products/services several clicks into your site, hiding your contact information...all these things make your visitors put forth more effort than necessary to view your site and make a purchase.

Web visitors generally follow the path of least resistance. Start placing too many demands on them, they’ll be mousing the other direction in a heartbeat. The bottom line is, you want these people to buy from you; make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

DO Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Confusing sites remain one of the top-ranking reasons visitors leave.

It’s easy to cut down on visitor confusion. Your site navigation system - be it buttons, links, whatever - needs to be easy to understand and consistent throughout your site.

DON’T Assault Their Senses

Lots of movement, blinking, and bright flashing colors will not induce visitors to click. It’s more likely to induce an adverse central nervous system reaction.

The focus of your site should be the content and products. Anything that distracts from those items is detrimental to your business. The cool “attention-getting” animated GIF on your page might just be stealing all the attention from your sales copy.

DO Choose Colors Carefully

Your color choices can effectively enhance the presentation of your information and/or products. Sites that are aesthetically pleasing are definitely more enjoyable to visit.

You’ll find lots of information on the psychological effects of color, but the main things to keep in mind are that the colors you choose should be visually appealing and work well together in terms of site navigation.

Don’t choose text/background/link colors so similar that it’s difficult for visitors to read your copy and discern hyperlinks. The other side of the coin is don’t choose colors that contrast so sharply the visitor wants to run screaming to the nearest optometrist for help.

Be especially wary of using bright blue text on red backgrounds or vice versa.

DON’T Get Carried Away

There are a lot of really cool things you can do that will thoroughly tick off a large majority of your visitors. I’ll discuss three: pop-up windows, frames, and dirty tricks.

Foremost among the offenders is the infamous pop-up window. Now, before I go any further, I use pop-ups myself. They’re effective. If you choose to use them, however, I suggest following two simple guidelines: don’t make the window that’s spawned huge - screensize-wise or filesize-wise - and don’t subject the visitor to a popup every time (s)he changes pages.

Frames, in theory, are a good idea. Frames, in practice, usually are not. Some designers do an excellent job with frames and I have no problems with those sites. What’s annoying is when you get a frame that doesn’t allow you to scroll to view all the contents or worse yet, frames that make you have to scroll vertically AND horizontally to see all the content. If you’re gonna do them, do them right.

Some webmasters seem to think trapping their visitors on site is a super idea. I’m sure you’ve been to sites that effectively disabled your browser’s Back button. I’m also sure that once you discovered you couldn’t back out of the site you said, Oh well, what the heck? I think I’ll buy something while I’m here. Webmasters who use this technique, take note: even in a world of infinite possibilities, that will NEVER happen! There’s a better chance of your tabby standing up on his hind legs and begging for a day at the waterslide.

If you discover after a little soul-searching that maybe you’re doing a few things that are counterproductive to your goals for Internet business success, take heart! We’ve all been guilty of one of more of these mistakes at one time or another.

Being an online business person means learning to recognize mistakes and correct them. It’s all part of the road to success!

Jennifer Johnson is the owner of jBanner.com. Providing custom-designed, high-quality banners for ONLY $19.99 each! Order yours today at: http://www.jbanner.com. Sign up for jBanner.com's free site design and promotion newsletter: mailto:jbanner-subscribe@topica.com