7 Web Design Elements That Annoy Online Visitors

Editor's Note: The following is another guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Mickie Kennedy, founder and president of eReleases, a cost-effective electronic press release distribution service, and a widely-regarded and well-respected PR professional who maintains the company's popular PR Fuel blog. How many times have you visited a Website, and been completely annoyed with one or more of its features (or lack thereof)? Probably in the thousands, right? Well, here are the top 7 Web design elements that put off users, and the actions that small businesses can take to address them.
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If you want to build a successful online presence, you need to have a fine-tuned Website that brings visitors in and gets them to take action once on your site. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to have the first part down (getting traffic), but when it comes to actually converting visitors into customers, they fail miserably.

That’s because a lot of sites are annoying. They drive visitors away almost as quickly as they arrive. To add insult to injury, the frustrated visitors usually end up going to a competitor’s site to get their needs taken care of by someone else.

Here are 7 things that annoy Website visitors:

1. Slow loading times.

I’ve seen studies that say Internet users give a site eight seconds to grab their attention. If it doesn’t satisfy them during that short time period, they’ll back out and go elsewhere. People are impatient. That’s why it’s so important to have a fast-loading site. Here’s a good post with tips for increasing site loading speed.

2. Autoplay music or video.

Seriously, this isn’t 1998. If your site starts playing music or video as soon as someone lands on it, you can bet more people than not will leave. It’s intrusive and annoying. Give visitors the option of playing the music or video. Don’t force it on them.

3. Cluttered layouts.

Have you ever walked into a messy room and tried to find something? It’s overwhelming, right? The same thing goes for a cluttered site layout. If every single space on your site is filled, you’re going to overwhelm visitors and make it too difficult for them to use your site. Remember, less is usually more, and white space is your friend.

4. Poor navigation.

Internet users have grown accustomed to using sites in a specific manner. They expect the navigation to be along the top or left-hand side of the page. They expect the navigation to be clear and the site to be organized in a logical manner. Don’t try to change this up. Keep it simple.

5. Forced registration.

Look, I understand you want to collect data for marketing purposes from your visitors. But there’s nothing more frustrating than forcing visitors to register before they can take certain actions. Most people don’t like giving out a lot of their personal information, so you’re only going to drive them away by doing this.

6. No contact information.

Your visitors shouldn’t have any problems getting in touch with you. You should have a dedicated contact page on your site, contact forms throughout, and you can even post your phone number or other contact info on each page of your site.

7. Too much Flash.

There’s nothing wrong with having some minor Flash elements on your site, but when your entire site is based in Flash, you’re going to have some problems. First, you’re losing most mobile internet users. And then you run into problems with simple usability issues like bookmarking pages, clicking the back button, etc.

What are some other things that annoy you on Websites? Please leave your comments here.

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