25 Reasons Why I'll Leave Your Website in 10 Seconds!

I found this great article about website usability and best practices on econsultancy.com that I wanted to share with you entitled “25 Reasons Why I’ll Leave Your Website in 10 Seconds“. I wanted to elaborate on a few of the 25.

1. Autosound – When I’m surfing the internet at work during my lunch break or researching a project, I hate it when a website starts screaming at me and it disturbs everyone in our office. I usually can’t find the mute button fast enough so I close the window immediately.

5. Slow load times – We live in the age of “Now”. We can get just about anything instant and that’s what we expect. Unless I really, really need something from your website, I will not spend more than 6 seconds waiting for a page to download. Build it efficiently and optimize your images. Images not optimized for the web is the first sign of an amateur developer. (Right click the image and select “View Image”. If the image is the same size then its optimized, if its 5x bigger than your screen, it’s not.)

7. Woeful navigation. We spend a lot of time planning our navigation with clients to make moving around a website easy, but many websites make it hard by hiding the navigation or moving it around on each page. Its okay for your navigation to be different on the homepage and interior pages, but it shouldn’t move on each page unless you’re a digital artist (which you’re not).

12. Typos.You do not look professional. Enough said.

13. Rubbish fonts. I know it’s the designer in me, but if you use Comic Sans or Papyrus, I will leave your website unless I’m pointing a finger at it laughing hysterically and showing it to my design team. Poor fonts reflect on your brand – childish, unimaginative, stale, boring, dated all come to mind when looking at poor font selection.

17. Cobwebs. Is your News page three years out of date? Does your blog still say coming soon a year later? Fix it or get rid of it. I assume you’re too busy to take on more work, in particular, my work.

20. Browser issues. If you’re website says “Best if using Internet Explorer 6” I will classify you with the same people in #5, #13, & #17 – old, dated, boring, and uncreative. Your website needs to work with the modern browsers and show correctly on PC & Mac and even iPhones & iPads.

22. No ‘About’ page. If you don’t tell me who you are, I won’t buy from you. I just saw a survey this morning asking would you buy from a website without a physical address and the answer should always be – NO! In the A/E/C industry, a typical transaction is in the millions of dollars. Prospects do their homework and want to work with someone they trust, like, and know will get the job done right. No “About” page. You just missed those 3 criterion.

24. Boring vs unprofessional. “Some sites have no verve, no personality, and are uniformly dull. Others live so far beyond the realms of expectation that you don’t quite know what to make of them. Both can be troublesome, as far as bounce rates are concerned.” The quote is from the article’s author. I couldn’t say it better myself.

The linked article lists 25 reasons why someone would leave your website nearly immediately. Can you think of 25 reasons why someone would stay on your website past 5 seconds? Why would they buy from your? What makes you different than your competitors? When searching 20+ companies just like yours, what makes you stand out? How are you perceived online?

The my favorite definition of “brand” is “what people say about your company/you when you walk out the room”. What are they saying about your website?