The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
How to Build a Bad Web Site
As part of a lengthy research project, I have had the opportunity over the past several weeks to review hundreds of Web sites in a wide variety of categories, ranging from news sites and general information sources to consumer-oriented
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commerce sites and B2B exchanges. Like any focused exercise, these past weeks have heightened my awareness to certain practices taking place on the Internet, turning what were formerly mere inconveniences into major impediments to
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completing my work, and in general making me want to rush away from the offending sites as
You have 1 message waiting for you! (blink, blink). You have 1 message waiting for you! (blink, blink). Click here to open more pop-up windows.
quickly as possible. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the research project, I had to spend some time on even the most disagreeable sites, and so that this experience did not go completely to waste, I thought I would compile my findings into a list of
I said, you have 1 message waiting for you! Will you click here already!?
recommendations for how to build a really bad Web site in order to give readers of this column a handy list of what steps to take if you want to keep your site free of that pesky Web traffic.
How to Lose Site Visitors
I hope that the above paragraph was as annoying for you to read as it was for me to write, because it will give you some idea of the experience your Web site visitors may be having if you have chosen to adopt some of the Internet's most troublesome of the modern advertising and would-be attention-getting practices. Yes, many sites are struggling. The growth in e-commerce has slowed, and ad rates are plummeting. In the face of these difficulties, who can blame site owners for resorting to whatever money-raising tactics they can?
Unfortunately, a great many of these practices are the digital equivalent of a land-based retailer's digging a deep, alligator-filled ditch in front of her store's entrance. She may discover some clever ways to "monetize" the ditch, but she'll probably lose more than a few customers in the process. In the same way, many Web site owners, in their desperation to generate revenue, are resorting to ultimately self-defeating steps that will wind up depriving them of the customers that they need most. When the digital dust settles some time next year, most of these sites will long since have disappeared, while their more stolid (some would say "boring") counterparts will be thriving. In the modern-day race between the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise will still win.
So herewith are a baker's half-dozen recommendations for becoming a hare, sprinting forward with some really annoying Web practices, and then falling behind when you discover that your best customers have left you for the tortoises of the Internet:
1. Sell lots of pop-up advertising windows.
Yes, everyone hates them and everyone complains about them, but advertisers that won't buy traditional banner ads are still paying for them (at least until the novelty wears off), so cash-starved sites are holding their figurative noses and taking what advertiser payments they can get. As a result, their sites' visitors must wade through a gantlet of rodent-like pop-up windows before they can read the site's content that they came to explore. One once-popular but cash-poor directory site, for instance, now greets visitors with not one, but two pop-up windows-and then adds a new one with every click. In researching a topic on the site recently, I looked up after a while to discover that more than twenty pop-up windows (all with the same message) had opened during my excursion. I had to spend several minutes tediously closing them down before I could proceed with my work. The site's sometimes useful content notwithstanding, I won't be visiting it again any time soon.
2. Don't let your visitors leave.
Almost as annoying as pre-visit pop-up windows are the pop-up windows that appear when one attempts to click out of a site. While this practice is employed on a variety of sites, it is particularly common among the Web sites of mainstream magazines. When a visitor decides to leave and types a new URL into the browser, the former site displays a pop-up window that pulls the visitor back, inviting him to subscribe to the print version of the publication (or making some similar offer). While the tactic sounds innocuous in theory, imagine how you would feel if, say, a Wal-Mart clerk yanked you back into the store as you were trying to leave with your day's purchases, only to offer you a discount for an item in which you had no interest. An otherwise pleasant experience would be coated with a bad departing aftertaste-not a very good recipe for generating customer loyalty.
3. Don't let your visitors get in.
I happen to love Macromedia Flash. I think it's one of the most useful design tools ever invented, and, I have to admit, in my early years as a Web site executive producer, I encouraged my developers to create the coolest Flash introductions for Web sites that they could. But there are so many great Flash designers now that the quality of Flash "opens" is far beyond what I could have imagined, much less executed, only a few years before. Unfortunately, the Internet isn't an art gallery, and if your site's purpose is to inform, or sell, or otherwise engage, you probably don't want to delay and possibly frighten away site visitors with elaborate displays of graphic virtuoso when what they really want to see is today's special or top story-any more than Wal-Mart or Target wants a phalanx of annoying panhandlers stationed outside their stores' entryway, blocking passage into their stores.
4. Be sure to build a useless "splash" page.
One of my favorite Internet experiences is typing in a Web address and being transported to a static Web page devoid of all content except for a pretty but essentially meaningless image or two and a simple message that says, "If you want to enter our site, click here." Now, perhaps I'm missing something, but if I were a site owner, I would assume that, if someone typed in my Web site's URL, they probably did want to enter my site, not just examine my creative director's latest artistic achievement. My first reaction when I see a message like that above is to rush for the exit gates. I suspect a great many other site visitors may feel the same.
5. Keep your site's purpose a mystery.
Like companies competing in the traditional marketplace, Web site owners struggle to distinguish themselves among the hundreds of similar sites. E-commerce service providers have had special difficulty with this challenge, and often wind up describing their offering in such clever and unique terms that it is not immediately clear what these companies actually propose to do for their clients. It is a problem that I have frequently noted, and so thought I had become jaded to it. But a couple of weeks ago I came across a site that trumped everything I had seen before. Professionally well-designed and by all appearances a mainstream e-commerce company, the site's dense front page was so obscure (though written in ordinary English) that after two or three minutes of reading and clicking on several links, I still had no idea whatsoever what the company did. I propose a simple test: show your preliminary site design to a group of intelligent but uninitiated neighbors, family members, or friends. If more than a few of them cannot figure out in a glance what your company does, your might want to explore another site concept.
6. Use really small photographs.
In an admirable effort to conserve bandwidth, a number of generally well-designed Web sites employ a variety of tiny photographic images that are not only hard to discern but create little emotional impact-and don't really speed download times all that much. Images can be extremely effective on the Web in establishing a mood or displaying a product-witness the great imagery employed from time to time by Mercedes, Apple, and others. Sites like these succeed with single, large, near-magazine quality images, sufficiently compressed so that page loads are not excessively delayed. They work wonderfully. On the other hand, the microscopic photographs used as bandwidth-savers on other sites typically come across as mere clutter-adding to download times without adding to the sites' value.
7. Make it really hard for your customers to contact you.
I recently made a purchase on eBay and attempted to pay with one of the third-party pay services that many of eBay's sellers accept. When the transaction with the payment service wouldn't go through (I had previously used the same credit card under another account name), I logged on to the pay service's Web site to locate the firm's telephone number. It was nowhere to be found. After several minutes' searching, the best I could come up with was an email address. I gave up trying to find a telephone number and wrote a request for a customer service representative to call me. No call came. But about an hour later I did receive a generic email that, while not attempting to answer the question I had asked, did provide the firm's mystery toll-charge telephone number. I called, and three times worked my way through one of the most circuitous IVR systems I have yet encountered, only to be cut off or misdirected. Finally, by (literally) randomly pushing buttons, I reached the customer support line, and was told by a machine that my wait time would be a mere 30 minutes. At last, a helpful representative came on the line and solved my problem (although she did keep trying to hang up before we were finished). The experience reminded me that, even in the digital age, customer service is as important as ever before. Memo to Web site owners: don't hide behind email and obtuse IVR systems; let your customers quickly and easily find you. They'll come back a lot more often than I will to the payment service company.
The Customer Experience
If the above thoughts come across as a bit churlish, that's a little how I feel after having searched through some 1,200 Web sites over the past few weeks. Consider the above an open complaint letter to the offending Web site owners-and if you are one of them, you know who you are. If I, a mere writer, have this reaction, you can imagine that many of your customers, who are there actually to find information or complete a transaction, may feel the same way. Most of them won't take the time to write. They'll simply leave and never come back, and you'll be none the wiser. If you value your site's future, don't let that happen. Because when all of the technology is deployed and all of the cutting-edge Web techniques are put in place, the basic customer experience remains the most important determinant of whether a customer returns again and again, or leaves for good. And that, more than anything, is the basic business bottom line.
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