You’ve heard of “How To Win Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie’s classic book on developing effective people skills? It delves into simple techniques for success in both business and personal life: refraining from criticism, expressing sincere appreciation, remembering to smile, remembering names, being a good listener. The latter half of the book, the “influence people” part, suggests ways to persuade people to your way of thinking without causing offense or resentment. All in all, a respected book on communicating for a positive outcome.
This article is the analog of Carnegie’s famous advice. It will tell you all you need to know to lose customers and frustrate your visitors. And like Carnegie’s simple advice on winning friends, losing customers is just as easy—all it takes is a bad website. Here’s how to make one.
Poor Design
1. Make your navigation difficult
I like to use the analogy that visiting a website for the first time is like driving a rented car. While different models of cars have different features, people expect that the brake pedal will be next to the gas pedal and the blinker lights will be on the steering column.
Frustrate your site visitors quickly by not placing common things on your site where they are expected to be. Make them spend a lot of time figuring out how to find things on your site until they get frustrated and leave.
2. Be Boring
Never update your site. Your site should look the same today as it did when you first went online five years ago.
3. Be Confusing
Use a different color scheme and graphic layout for each product page or service you offer. Don’t tie in your themes from one page to the next so your visitors don’t know if they’re still on the same site or not. Link from text that doesn’t explain what the link is about or where it will take the visitor. Use buttons that don’t explain what clicking them will do.
4. Be Impenetrable
Don’t include a search box or site map.
5. Be Invisible
Include little text, lots of pictures, and extensive use of Javascript so search engines can’t find your site. Go ahead, take a long lunch…no one else will be able to find you either.
6. Be Hard to Read
Use yellow text on a white background. Or a tiny font, or one with lots of curlicues.
7. Play Hard to Get
Don’t include contact information, customer service phone numbers, or email unsubscribe options.
8. “We” All Over Your Pages
Only talk about yourself and your business, not the customer’s needs or how you can serve them. In other words, let every statement you make be a “we” statement: We can do this, We can do that…
9. Write Poorly
Have no concern for proper grammar or spelling.
10. Be Bouncy
Don’t offer relevant or interesting content, so visitors have no incentive to stay on your site and bounce right off.
Poor Technical Aspects
1. Slow Down
Use lots of large photos, uncompressed video and audio files, and lots of html tags so your website loads slowly.
2. Bombard With Pop-ups
Have pop-up ads and special offers jump out from everywhere.
3. Be Incompatible
HTML renders differently depending on the operating system, display resolution, and code interpretation. Let your site look different in every different browser that someone might use.
4. Be Broken
Have links that go nowhere, missing photos, and missing pages so your visitors get lots of “file not found” messages.
5. Be Inconsistent
Don’t maintain or upgrade your functionality so that half the time it doesn’t work.
6. Always Interrupt
Don’t properly upgrade, have programs and applications that freeze, or an unreliable server that crashes your site.
7. Be Unprotected
Don’t protect your forms and code so that anyone can enter whatever they want and possible hijack your site.
8. Be Demanding
Make a site that only looks good or works well if the visitors installs lots of plug-ins, or uses just one specific browser or version.
9. Use Frames
Search engines have a hard time finding pages within a framed site, visitors can’t bookmark a framed page, and not all browsers support frames.
Poor Marketing
1. Be Vague
Include no or poorly written calls to action so that your visitors don’t know what they are supposed to do.
2. Don’t Deliver
Make promises your products and services don’t keep.
3. Don’t Keep In Touch
Don’t offer a newsletter, and don’t have a sign-up form on your site for receiving any communications from you.
4. Don’t Track Your Results
Don’t pay any attention to your tracking program, to see how many page views you get or how people are finding you, or what they’re searching for to get to you. Don’t even use an analytics program? That’s even better.
5. Don’t Follow Through
If you do get an email inquiry or other lead, don’t follow up and answer their questions, especially don’t respond promptly.
6. Be Forgettable
Don’t offer anything interesting or valuable, so your site is forgettable and boring.
7. Don’t Promote Your Site
Don’t include your web address on your business cards, or email signature. If you do, make sure it’s spelled wrong.
8. Overcharge
Charge customers above and beyond the already high shipping costs, so that you can make a few bucks at their expense. But don’t tell them that you charge a fee until they’ve already decided to buy from you.
9. Hide Your Policies
Don’t include information about your return policy, shipping policy, or privacy policy. Who reads them anyway?
All of these elements on a website work together to create an untrustworthy and unprofessionally designed site. Pick any one of these three lists to follow and start chipping away at your trust and credibility. You’re guaranteed to create a bad website and lose customers.
