Have you ever been to a website looking for some information or a good bit of entertainment, only to find yourself greeted by a page that’s so offensive you end up leaving right away? We’ve all seen websites that are ugly or that frustrate us, but often we leave before we can stop to think about what precisely it is about those pages that we find so hard to stomach. Here we will look in more detail at a few of the things that make us angry when we’re looking around a website and a few of the things that could potentially be driving your customers and viewers away before they’ve had a chance to look around. This is an anti checklist of things you don’t want on your page. How many are you guilty of?

Bad Colour Schemes: The wrong colours can often be enough to drive you away from a site, or just to make you want to move on quickly. Colours that make too much of an assault on the senses like bright reds and oranges, colours that badly clash, or colours that make it difficult to read can all give visitors a headache and mean they want to look at a more attractive site.

Obtrusive Ads: Site owners who display adverts on their site too obtrusively are demonstrating a real lack of knowledge when it comes to the nature of business. Business is all about planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into something you can make a profit from – sticking an advert in the face of anyone who comes to your pages might get you a few clicks initially, but ultimately it will lose you money as you damage your reputation and any chance of getting repeat views or regular readers. Subtle adverts win you respect which is worth a lot more than a few extra clicks.

Music: Few sites are guilty of this anymore, but that’s a good sign of just how irritating this particular error is. Most of us browse the web while listening to a music track of our choosing and so the last thing we want when we view another page is to hear more loud music that clashes with our own. Remove it!

Bad Grammar: Have you ever read a paragraph in an article only to realize that you haven’t actually taken any of it in? Then maybe gone back read it again and realized just how confusing it all is? Again you might save money in the short term by hiring writers willing to produce content at $1 per thousand words, but the result will be that your website doesn’t offer anything of value to the people visiting it. Which is irritating…

No Navigation: If it takes someone on your page longer than a minute to find where they want to go then you’re going to lose a lot of visitors. In other words, if they can’t quickly find a list of your articles, or your contacts page, then they will certainly be able to find the ‘back’ button pretty rapidly…

Tom Koh is a veteran internet marketer and a regular blogger. He has written a great post on how to manage  online gambling traffic

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Image credit: Lady using laptop, all other images provided by the author.