We all
understand value of positive and professional
communication in e-commerce. There is no disagreement
that communication channels should project a positive
and professional image about your company. Your
website being a major part of your communication
channel, indeed your face to outside world - must
project a positive image about your company.
Unfortunately, when it comes to website design
many of us forget this simple fact. Instead of
being sensitive to customers' concern and need
for information, we fall for technology showmanship
or other strange considerations. Sad part is -
many of us do not even realize how awful or messy
our websites actually look !
This week - let us discuss the features of a
messy website or 'How to drive away customers
and spread negative image about your company'
How to Drive Customers Away
- Force every visitor to register before they
can enter your site. For a thorough and professional
job - make them fill out a lengthy form, giving
you a lot of detailed information that you will
never use. Make every field compulsory.
- Start your home page with a huge graphic,
preferably totally meaningless. However, visitors
will never get to know until all of 1 Mb is
fully downloaded. Never make it interlaced,
do not specify HEIGHT and WIDTH tags, and by
all means never use ALT tags.
- Be really creative on title - make it ambiguous
and meaningless like "Home Page,"
or "Welcome to our Site!!!"
- Make the home page really cryptic to baffle
any Columbus making it through the registration
and lengthy graphic download. Avoid simple labels
like "Contact Us," "About Us",
"Our Catalog," "Services We Offer,"
"Frequently Asked Questions" etc.
Get really imaginative in naming your sections
(e.g. "Take Off !", "Buzz the
Bean" etc.) "Cool Stuff" is an
old standby that still doesn't work.
- Have a "vision", "mission",
"goals" and "objectives"
statements. Ensure that these statements reveal
nothing about the actual services you offer.
How to Project Negative Image
- Use lots of continuous text without white
spaces around. Sentences should be long and
winding. The idea is to make it long and ambiguous
to leave every visitor gasping for breath.
- Pay special attention at spelling and grammatical
mistakes. Nothings spreads negative images as
much as miss-spelt words and silly grammatical
mistakes.
- Always use lots of exclamation points and,
be sure to put commas, where they don't belong!!!!!!!!
- Page layout is one of the easiest things to
do badly on a website. Always use plenty of
horizontal rules and bulleted lists. Make columns
either narrower than 1" or wider than 4".
- Never check your pages on different browsers,
because what looks dreadful on Netscape might
look unacceptably good on Internet Explorer.
- Remember, you have almost unlimited colours
and fonts at your disposal. Use as many of them
as you can. Let the world know what a creative
guy you are.
- Always avoid navigational links - let visitors
wander around your site aimlessly. Visitors
must spend quite some time appreciating your
talent before making anything about of the company.
- Do not care about broken links - visitors
anyway will find what they are looking for.
- Never forget to use flowery Javascripts that
slows down pages or display strange messages.
Damn the content, you must display your programming
prowess !
- Never use meta tags - search engines may then
pick your site leading to more visitors at your
site. If you must use meta tags, make sure they
are thoroughly confusing and misleading so that
search engines either do not touch you or index
your site in wrong category.
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