Your website is usually the first impression your visitors receive of your business so if it is poorly designed and/or contains lots of mistakes it will drive them away. Due to the lack of website traffic you won’t generate many sales and may conclude starting an online business is a waste of time and money. 95% of businesses fail in the first 5 years so your chances of being successful are not high.
Since your website is the window of your business to the world you need to avoid the common mistakes website owners make when building their site.
30 Ways to Create a Bad Website
WEB DESIGN
1. Use colors that don’t match. For example place dark text on a dark background so it will be difficult to read.
2. Use as many colors as possible. For example use a different color for the background, fonts, navigation, images, header, footer and links.
3. Clutter. Jam all your information onto one page so there is no white space between any of the elements.
4. Hide your navigation bar so visitors have to scroll vertically or horizontally to find information.
5. Use images for navigation links to slow the loading of your web pages.
6. Don’t make navigation links change color when your mouse hovers over them.
7. Make the navigation text the same color as the background navigation.
8. Don’t include a site map so visitors can’t see the table of contents for your website and make it difficult for search engine spiders to index all your web pages.
9. Use large images, videos and javascript to slow the loading of your web pages.
10. Add plenty of images to each page so pages won’t load within a few seconds
11. Use images unrelated to the content of your website.
12. Make your web pages very wide or long so visitors will have to scroll horizontally and/or vertically to read all the content.
13. Design your web pages for a small screen resolution so people with large computer screens will find your pages difficult to read.
14. Design your site to only display correctly for one type of browser ie Internet Explorer so you don’t have to bother how it looks in other browsers such as Firefox or Google and drive visitors away.
15. Don’t check for broken links or html errors so visitors can’t navigate your site correctly and/or the pages don’t render well in all browsers.
WEB COPY
16. Don’t use text on your web pages, only images.
17. Use small text to make it difficult for visitors to read.
18. Avoid using h1, h2, h3 tags to highlight headings and subheadings.
19. Avoid using bullet points to break up the content of your site.
20. Write your web copy in 3rd person (we, our) so you avoid connecting with your audience.
21. Don’t split your content into paragraphs so you can fit all your content on one page.
22. Avoid inserting keywords in your content so search engines won’t index your pages.
23. Copy content from another website and paste it into your own so search engines see duplicate content and lower your rankings.
24. Don’t create a title meta tag containing your keyword so your site won’t rank well in the search engines.
25. Don’t write a description for the meta description tag so visitors won’t know what the page is about.
26. Create exactly the same meta tags for every page so search engines will view them as duplicate content and not rank them.
27. Use the same content for every web page to annoy your visitors.
28. Don’t include your contact information so visitors won’t know who is the owner of the site and avoid building a trust relationship with them.
29. Don’t collect visitors information so you won’t have to follow-up on them.
30. Don’t track your visitors so you won’t know if your traffic is growing, where your visitors are coming from and what keywords are being used to find your website.
If you implement any or all of these 30 ways to create a bad website you’ll annoy your visitors and it won’t get found in the search engines. You’ll be well on your way to building an unprofitable online business.
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