Bharat Bhise – Common Complaints When People Use Websites
Bharat Bhise and I have spent over ten years together working on our online business and one of the most common challenges which we have had has been our website. In the early days Bharat would take control of this has he has a wonderfully creative mind and the skills to design great looking websites. As the business grew and we continued to update however, we found that creativity was only a small part of what building a great website actually looked like. The last time that we rebuilt the site we did a survey on Twitter of the aspects of a website which people were frustrated by the most, and so we made sure to avoid them when building the new site. IF you are building a site, for any purpose, here are the things which will make people go back and seek out another site.
Page Load Time
People have little patience in the modern age where everything that they want is at their fingertips and this is why a slow page load time on your site can result in you losing users very quickly. Research backs this up too and it has been shown that any page which takes longer than 2.5 seconds to load, is likely to turn people away. Page load speed slows down when you have masses of media on there or a plug-ini which is malfunctioning.
Overwhelmed
It is all well and good to put calls to action on your site, which can help you to grow your email list or have users take advantage of offers and promotions, but overdoing it and users will get overwhelmed and hit the back button. This is a fine balance to strike and whilst marketing t your users is a good idea, overdoing it will have the opposite result.
Navigation
One of the biggest frustrations which people told us about was not being able to navigate around the website with ease. This can be difficult if you have a site that is packed with information and there is a temptation to create many menus and sub-menus on every available space on the page. Overdoing it however is only going to result in users not being able to find what they want when they come to you. Use smart internal links and simplistic menus to avoid this from happening.
Broken Links
Broken links can happen for a number of reasons but if you haven’t addressed it before the user does, they are going to get pretty annoyed. You can only imagine the annoyance of clicking a link to view a product only to find that it is broken. There are plug-ins that you can use to notify you of broken links so be sure that you are taking advantage of them and getting those links fixed before the user finds out.
Avoid these issues and you are going to have visitors who are far happier and much more likely to engage.