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How to Create a Bad Website and Frustrate Your Visitors
By Jason OConnor (c) 2009

If you're a sadistic kind of webmaster or website owner and
have a burning desire to royally frustrate and anger your
site visitors each and every time they visit your site,
these three lists are just for you. If you want to have a
terrible website that looks bad, works horribly and breaks
fundamental marketing rules, read on.

First let me explain why there are three lists. One way to
look at any website is to break it up into three equally
important segments; design, technical and marketing. In
other words, every site on the Web contains these three
components.

They all have a design or look and feel (design), they all
have to be on a server and coded properly to be live on the
Internet (technical) and they all have ways in which they
attract visitors and make sales (marketing).

Let's look at the top ten ways in which you can annoy your
website visitors and basically fail miserably at the whole
website endeavor in each of the three segments. The
following is a list, broken up into the three categories,
defining exactly what NOT to do.

Top 10 Web Design Mistakes:

1. Never using Web conventions, instead use crazy and wacky
formats that no one's ever seen and no one can understand.

2. Writing trite, predictable, boring or copied content
only and never updating your site.

3. Creating totally different and unique navigation for
every page so that your visitors need to waste time
re-learning your navigation every time they go to a new
page. Also creating totally different look & feels for
every page so that your visitors never know if they're on
the same site or clicked away.

4. Using confusing, obfuscated and mysterious labels for
all your links and buttons so that no one ever has any idea
where they're going if they click. The more confusing, the
better.

5. Making it impossible to search the site. Offering no
search box, no site map and basically no possible way to
find anything on your website.

6. Including content that only talks about you. Never
mentioning anything about your visitors or how you can help
them, just talk about you and your history and all your
achievements. Including a big picture of you and your
office building right on the home page.

7. Including only poorly-written copy with lots of grammar
mistakes, and ubiquitous, curious and horrendous spelling
and punctuation mistakes throughout your site.

8. Not including any text. Making every page on your site
one big picture. So for instance, on your home page have
one giant picture of you and your office building and have
no text so search engines can't see your site at all.

9. Using buttons for your navigation only, or use
complicated JavaScript drop down menus that complicate your
site's navigation. Either way, if you do this and include no
text links, the search engines won't be able to spider
(navigate and record) your website.

10. Making your site as difficult to read as possible. Use
teeny, tiny fonts that are hard to read against some
funky-colored background. For instance, use blue fonts on a
black background.

Top 10 Technical Mistakes:

1.Making your website take forever to load in people's
browsers. The longer the better.

2. Making it so that your site looks completely different
on everybody's computer. So for Macs your site looks
one way, and for PCs it looks another way. Or having it
look totally different in Internet Explorer, Chrome and
Firefox.

3. Making it so that any functionality on the site is
confusing to figure out and works improperly and
inconsistently every time it's used.

4. Including lots of broken links and missing images
throughout.

5. Setting it up so that it regularly crashes. For example,
if more than three people are visiting the site at the same
time, the home page becomes inaccessible.

6. Has no form validation. Allowing visitors to enter any
thing under the sun into your website forms. Maybe some
smart hacker-types will enter executable code that corrupts
or takes over your server.

7. Making all your site visitors have to download and
install lots of plug-ins to view your site properly. If
they don't, too bad.

8. Telling people that they have to view your site in a
specific browser and browser version only.

9. Making it so that there are tons of pop-ups, moving
newsletter sign-up boxes, running videos, animations and
Flash movies that take forever to download before you can
view the site.

10. Using lots of frames.

Top Ten E-Marketing Mistakes:

1. Making your website completely bounce-friendly. In other
words, make it 'un-sticky' so that when people arrive on
one of your pages, they leave immediately.

2. Including no calls to action so that your site never
asks your website visitors to do a thing. Making it so that
every page is a dead end that leaves your visitors
scratching their heads and then clicking away.

3. Does absolutely nothing to build your brand.

4. Has no terms or policies page.

5. Evoke no emotions. Making your site flat, boring, gray,
dull and forgettable.

6. Making sure there is no way for anyone who visits your
site to sign up for anything or give you their contact info
or email address. Certainly don't use your site to build
any kind of email list.

7. Converting absolutely no one who visits your site into a
paying customer. Ever.

8. Including no phone number, email and absolutely no other
way to contact you. Hide behind your website.

9. Never using any kind of an analytics program like Google
Analytics or Web Trends and never measuring or even looking
at your website activity.

10. Making it so that search engine can't read your site
and make it so that people can't really read your site
either.

Follow these three lists perfectly and you'll be well on
your way to having a bad and useless website and
frustrating and angering everyone who visits.
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Jason OConnor owns and operates Oak Web Works, LLC
http://www.oakwebworks.com, http://www.jasonoconnor.com and
writes a periodic, free web design and marketing newsletter
http://www.thenetgazette.net .
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