Irrelevant Ramblings

Frustrating Navigation

If visitors have a hard time navigation through the site to find what they are looking for, many of them will leave. I’m sure we’ve all been in the position of the frustrated visitor. To make things easier, navigation should be given plenty of thought and attention. The pages that are most important or most commonly sought after should be very easy to find, and navigation should be logical and intuitive. Larger sites can use a sitemap and/or a sitewide search to help visitors who want to use them.

Annoying Advertisements

While ads can lead to lost visitors because of clicks on the ads, the can also chase visitors away is they are too distracting or intrusive. Most visitors now have come to expect ads on websites and blogs, and you shouldn’t lose many visitors on that principal alone. However, if you use accept ads that are overly flashy, have moving parts or changing colors, you could chase some people away.

Slow Loading Pages

No one likes to sit and wait for pages to load, and if it takes too long visitors simply won’t wait. This is obviously influenced by the connection speed of the user, so some of it is out of your control. However, you can use a stats program like Google Analytics to tell you what percentage of your visitors have different types of internet connections. From this data you can get a good idea about how fast your pages need to load. If most of your visitors are using dial-up, page loads should be as quick as possible. On the other hand, if most of your visitors are on high-speed connections, you can take some more liberty with the design and content.

Audio or Video that Starts Automatically

Although audio and video are very common online today, most visitors prefer to have the option to start it themselves. Visitors that are greeted with a startling sound that they didn’t choose to start will often click the back button and be gone. If you use these elements in your pages, give the visitor the option to start them. LOSE THE MUSIC even if you have a photography site.

Poor Readability

If visitors aren’t able to read the content, or if they have a hard time doing so, they may just leave. This is especially an issue with blogs. Be careful with background colors and images, as well as text color and link color, and also make sure to use adequate whitespace. Things like headings, lists, and short paragraphs can also improve readability.

Outdated

Have you ever landed on a page that said “last updated 2001?? Depending on what you are looking for, this page may be of no use to you. Things online change so quickly that old information is often irrelevant. When setting up a blog one of the decisions you’ll have to make is whether or not to show the post date. Readers often like to see the date just to understand the context of the post and to understand its significance, but showing the date can also cause some lost visitors if they arrive at older posts.

(HT: vandelay)

My sister and long time friend have opened up a business selling designer baby blankets, pacifier clips, and oversized rag quilts. They have some amazing designs and a great product, my son loves his blanket and takes it every where with him.  So please go and check it out, and make sure to share the link with anyone you know that might be preggers.

Mention to anyone with computer savvy that your laptop has somehow gotten slower over recent months and they’ll ask you the same thing: “have you defragmented your hard drive?” Defragmenting works by taking small slivers of information stored in various locations and consolidating them so that they’re in the same place on the drive and thus easier to access in larger chunks. Hard drive fragmentation is a great metaphor for – if not a literal manifestation of – what’s happened to our brains over years and years of processing small bursts of information. 2009 took fragmentation to a whole new level given the rise of Twitter and the social acceptance of texting people as a substitute to making phone calls.

Try defragmenting your mental and psychological hard drive over the course of a week. I invite you all to participate.

Guidelines:

I floated the idea last week on Twitter to see if anyone could envision themselves doing this, and the responses were interesting; some said they could definitely do it, but many were resigned to the idea, calling it impossible. If it is impossible, than my theory is already proven and we’re in big trouble as a society.

This can be done, people.

via: JM