When good sites go bad; to keep visitors coming back to your home page, avoid these top five per peeves

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by Charles Pappas

To keep visitors coming back to your home page, avoid these top five pet peeves

MISTAKES CAN SINK YOUR BUSINESS FASTER THAN the Titanic, and your Web site won't stay afloat if it falls victim to some of the most common errors. It's not just clashing colors or misspelled words that turn potential customers off; it's a lack of basic amenities that end up making their time at your site as much fun as a visit to a 19th-century dentist. That's why we asked several top Web designers and critics to point out the five worst things sites do, so you can learn what not to do.

Get to the Point, Already! Some sites just don't do anything for visitors. "It seems as though the United States Postal Service's (www.usps. gov) page, for example, is designed to satisfy the organization's own management and not to solve typical customer problems," explains Jakob Nielsen, Sun Microsystems's Web usability guru, "which is one of the most common mistakes in Web design."

Nielsen, author of a forthcoming book on site design (www.excellentsites.com), admits that the Postal Service site does have useful features. "There's a rate calculator and a helpful zip code finder, but these features are not made prominent in the design. Instead, the site gushes about the USPS, while its useful features are hidden behind obscure links." According to Nielsen, you shouldn't make your visitors struggle to find valuable information. Instead, place quick links on your home page, because "the Web is an immediate medium with very impatient users. The focus should be on what the site can do for me this minute."

We Hate to Wait It would be nice if that Web page you're downloading would arrive today--or at least before the next Ice Age. That's a pet peeve of Amy Gahran, who publishes Contentious (www.contentious.com), a Web magazine for creators of online content. "There are a lot of problems with General Motors' site," she says, "but a particularly good example is its index of GM vehicles."

"Watch how long it takes to download this page [www.gm.com/vehicles/index.html] ," says Gahran, referring to a page chock full of heavy graphics, animations, and Java applets. Even with an ISDN line, your computer grinds to a halt. "A page with such little informational content should download in five seconds or less, in my book." One piece of advice: Provide text links while the image is loading so that people can bypass long downloads. Better yet, try to keep images under 10K for quick downloads.

Nielsen agrees. The USPS site, he explains, is "overly graphical, meaning slow downloads. All the text is represented as images and not as ASCII [as it should be] ." Some people have the attention span of a fly, but that doesn't mean they need a Web page to instantly appear. According to Nielsen, "Users will wait about 15 seconds for a few pages to load."

"The problem [with GM's index] is that I've just spent a long time to download a page with very little information," Gahran fumes. "It's just a series of pointers toward the real information. And I only have the vaguest notion about what that information will be. GM apparently doesn't care about wasting my time."

What a Long, Strange Scroll It's Been In the time it takes to scroll down the National Association of Investigative Specialists (pimall.com/nais/nais.menu.html) home page, the group could have run The Maltese Falcon (22 seconds to be exact). We had to muddle through the opening page, a mishmash of awards, subscription information, newsletter articles, and a guestbook. You don't have to be on the Hawaii 5-0 team to deduce that visitors won't like that. "Only 10 percent of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen," Nielsen warns. "All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page." So we recommend that your home page be only two screen pages in length. Anything beyond that will turn off your visitors.

Don't Play Hard to Get It's hard enough to persuade prospects to spend money online, but what if a site acts as if the company doesn't even want their money in the first place? Neopost Products and Services (www.neopost.com/4.html) lists its phone number and asks you to call today about its technologically advanced products--and that makes the site backward and useless, says Nielsen. Granted, you should give customers your phone and fax numbers and mailing address, but don't make them hunt for basic information offline. You want to offer people all the information they need in one place. "Asking visitors to make a phone call for more information is guaranteed to cost you business."

Speaking of customer relations, few prospects will be shifting gears for GT Bicycle's site (www.gtbicycles. com) anytime soon. William Craft, Web columnist for OnlinePress, notes, "The site's designer wants to impress you with his design rather than promote the company's products." Want to buy a bicycle here? Forget it. We searched and couldn't find a way to order one. Want to navigate through links to GT Bicycle's favorite dealers and buy a bike or accessory? Forget that too. Apparently it isn't the company's vision to make sales via the Web...or even to help consumers find local retailers.