Flaws that Turn Your Visitors Away

It is consumers world!!. Visitor to your site needs perfection. Some pitfalls in your site and you bet your would scare the visitors away. Go to some site that offer expired or expiring domains and you would notice that sufficient number of sites have cropped up to offer these names. What are these expired domains? These are the domains which were once the dream eyed projects of some wanna’bes in IT world, which having failed to click, are now in market place for resale.
What are the reasons for such failures? One has to understand the user’s psyche...

In my seven years experience as webmaster, what I have learned is that a web page appears “differently” to webmaster and a user. Both see them from their own perspective. Now, when on any subject, millions of site are available, user is not obliged to compromise on his expectations from a site and gets repelled very fast in case the site does not match his expectations. In fact, a recent survey pointed out that small issues as color scheme or navigation or even spelling errors had effect on user behavior on the site.
Here are some of the seemingly small pitfalls that weigh heavily on the performance of the site. In fact, some of the issues may seem so trivial that you may tend to ignore them in the first place, but these small factors can scare your visitors away and ruin your business reputation beyond redemption.
1. Excessive Use of Technical Terms
Don’t try to impress visitors by pumping in excessive number of heavy and technical terms that may put a surfer to sleep. Try to talk technical with ease of simplicity. Users need to grow gradually with the terms and try to make site friendly for wider spectrum of audience.
2. Protect against Piracy
Ensure your visitor of genuine content. Mark every page as copy right or protected. There are many sites that offer your protection against copying content at a nominal cost. This small investment would be worthwhile to ensure your visitors of unique content.
3. Participative Approach
Give users a private space on the site to leave their rating, comments, blogs or queries. You should think over giving a space designated to tell your visitors what you want them to do next. For example, Sign up for my newsletter, Order now, etc.
4. Under construction
Test the site before launch. Do offline testing of features where required or create a team of spectrum of users to test the site offline. Don’t be in an undue haste to launch the site, but when you do, be sure of all the functionalities. Hasty launch of site is a sure shot way of telling the world that you are struggler. Yes, for some advanced features, testing with real time visitor could be necessary, but be reasonably sure that it has passed through all testing in lab environment and announce politely to visitors that it is a beta launch and have proper interaction channels with visitors for the problems or feedback that visitor may have..
5. Avoid Visitor Counter.
Normally visitors will not care enough for counter stats displayed on the site. Too low a figure will leave poor impression on visitors and too high figure would look like fictitious one. In any case, there are other tools available on net which can tell about visitors to the site, and as a webmaster, it would be better to concentrate on content rather than counter.
6. Mindless use of passive verbs
Active verbs lend a energetic and activism note to your text and avoid use of passive ver\bs unless where absolutely necessary.
7. Short and Simple sentences.
Long sentences may require a re-reading of sentence. Reader may have to concentrate heavily to understand the text and much impact of some of your ideas could be lost in case of excessively lengthy sentence structure. Keep sentences short for easy readability and understandability.
8. Pages on the site are lengthy
Typically a pge should not be more than 700 words and even this figure is on higher side. Try to wind up the text in 450 to 600 words. You can use extracted portions in articles for added highlights. If the cyber behavior of users is anything to go by, keep your pages brief and concise. Don’t bore readers with lengthy stuff and where such length is absolute necessity, split in various chapters and make easy navigation.
9. Highlight features of your product or services.
Help a user understand the features of products and services you offer to help the understand product they buy. Provide user feedback and comments to convey user a transparent understanding of product. Provide for independent third party ratings.
10. Eliminate typographical and grammatical errors
Typographical errors mean a shoddy and unprofessional work. This in turn would be reflection of quality of content on your site. You need to be a little serious in approach and a bit careful in methodology. Hence what can be inferred upon here is that if people are going to believe that you do not take your site seriously, they won't either.