Make Your Website Visitors Stay – and Buy (Part II)

In the first part of this series, we have talked about how obtrusive ads, making your visitors register and bad navigation can drive your customers away from your site.

Here are two more bad practices:

1. Improper use of multimedia elements.

How many times have you visited a site and was startled when a loud background music started playing? Or when you open several tabs and suddenly you hear someone talking and you have to find the tab with the bothersome video or sound byte?

When confronted with a site that automatically plays video or audio clips, the first reaction most users have is to close it. After all, clicking on the X button is way easier than looking for the media player and its stop button.

It would be a good idea to just leave it to your visitors whether or not they would like to see the video or hear your background music. Also your video or music might distract people from getting the information they need from your site. It may also become a problem if your site’s visitor has a slow Internet connection, making watching the video more of a pain than a pleasure.

2. Boring or inappropriate content.

You may have a design that is very dull and boring. And the truth is, nobody will stay if you have content that is very dull and uninteresting to read, even if you think it’s great for the kind of audience you are targeting.

Also a website that offers no interactivity will easily be forgotten. Make sure that you create a great user experience for anybody who is going to visit your website. Allow your users to leave comments, participate in forums, share your page on social media sites and other things that allow them to interact with you and your site.

Another thing that turns your customers off is inappropriate content. If they come into your site expecting something and they do not get it, they will surely leave as quickly as they came.

For example, if they come to your site because they were looking for information on green flies, but your page talks about flies in general or wose, about mosquitoes, then they will exit and go to your competitors.