5 Ways to Make Everyone Hate Your Website - A 2.0 Guide

Much has been said about what not to do to a website from the 1.0 perspective – hopefully you will enjoy my upgrade.

1. No Interactivity

We have progressed so far beyond static websites that if you do not have something on your site that is guaranteed to engage the reader through interactivity, you will inevitably lose that reader.  If you have a blog, “widgets” are often available that will add some form of interactivity to your page.  While the content should be attractive enough to keep them, your site is more likely to be bookmarked if it has something that your audience can “click on” to keep them interested. 

2. Display Poor Content

I recently had a good look at an SEO firm that had one central strategy – design beautiful sites with poor content,  get as many IBL’s (inbound links) as possible to those sites, get them to rank highly on the search engines, and sell advertising on them.  While this strategy wasn’t horrible short term, long term it really was.  Eyeballs would not have been kept naturally on these sites, as they were only giving bare facts relating to the subject. 

Taking out a bit of a crystal ball here, I believe that the search engine’s algorithms are going to evolve so that they will be able to tell the difference between rich content and poor content.  Some would say that they are already there.

For example, if you come to a site for chiropractors, and the index page tells you why chiropractors are wonderful, and that is all, you will hate that site.  Your readers would also hate that site too, and won’t come back.

Good content keeps people – just creating a site will not do the trick, no matter how attractive it is.

3. Do Not Optimize for Firefox or Safari

I was recently shocked when I noticed that a website for a leading financial services company was not optimized for Firefox, to the point that the menu did not work properly in Firefox and some content did not display.  This was a multi-million dollar company that relied on its website for daily interaction with its financial services customers (ie banks, credit unions, etc.). 

Sadly this is all too common.  While Firefox and Safari users may show up as the minority on most analytics tools, Firefox and Safari users are the more web-savvy of the bunch and as such, are much more likely to become site haters if you do not cater to them.  Optimize for Firefox or Safari or find yourself without the love of people who have become so attached to their Macs that they worship them. 

4. Do Not Use Meta-Tags

While this may not make people personally hate your site, and of course the vast majority of your people may still not notice, keep in mind that some search engines still use meta tags to both rank your site and act as your site description in the SERPs.  If I see a site description that just starts with the first few words of the index copy, I have a tendency to get confused.  So will your treasured readers.

Meta-tags may not be as important in the SEO/SEM world – that doesn’t mean that you may ignore them.

5. Do Not Provide Any Contact Information

This is the greatest site hater incitement of all time.  Consider the thought process of your buyers:

1. Lovely, great product.  I want some. 
2. How do I get in touch? 
3. Through a form? 
4. I don’t think so. 

Some people will have the patience to sit there and type out their questions in your form.  Others that are more web savvy will wonder if the form is even attached to an e-mail address and will just hunt you down through other means anyway. 

Most will not bother and will not come back. 

Forms are only useful as a supplement to concrete contact information.  As a preferred method of getting in touch, they bomb. 

5. No Stumble Upon, Digg It, Add To Facebook Links

How does word of a websites’ awesomeness spread?  Back in the Jurassic of 1.0, it was through e-mail.  Now, it is through Stumble Upon, Digg, Facebook, and any one of the popular social networking sites.   This is particularly true of blog articles – no blog can be without this important tool.