AbhiSays.com

10 Most Hated features of a website or blog

Yesterday I got a mail from a blogger. It was as follows.

Hi Abhishek

I have submitted my blog to blog directories and some blog communities

I have told my friends & relatives about my blog.

I have mentioned my blog address in visiting card, letter heads etc.

I have added my blog address in my email signature.

I always give comments to other blogs and put my blog link there.

I update my blog regularly.

Still there is very less traffic on my blog. Can you suggest me the reasons ?

So I am giving the list of 10 most hated features of a website or blog that may be responsible for the less traffic. large.jpg

Popups — pop ups are widely used in websites or blogs to advertise new products and to get extra impressions, clicks for them. But the visitors find them very annoying. Remember the google policy “You can make money without doing evil.”. So it’s better not to use popups in your blog or website.

Redirection –URL redirection should be avoided as far as possible. The user feel cheated when he clicks any url and he redirects to completely different content or site.

Blog Community Widgets — I personally don’t like the community widgets provided by blog communities like mybloglog.com or blogcatalog.com. They increase the timing of the page loading and also diverts the attention of the user from your site.

Different Design for subfolders — Suppose you are running a community portal. It has forums, blogs, chat rooms, photo gallery. You are using different scripts for them and they are installed in different sub-folders. I know it is difficult to use same theme, look and feel and design for them but at least you should try to keep at least the same logo and background for all the modules.

Dark Colors in theme or background. — Avoid use of dark colors, they are only better for porn and gambling sites. For instance, every product of google is using light colors as they better for eyes and on such sites with light colors user can spend maximum of his time.

Page Loading — Loading of the page should be very fast so that user should not wait and watch for your content to load. It is very essential for the success of any site. I can give you example of google, it’s search results are not much different from that of other search engines but the thing that matters is the fast results that google gives on searching any keyword. Clean your pages removing large picture (especially .bmp files), video, flash etc files.

Banner ads — Unnecessary banner ads diverts the attention of the user from your website. So do not use banners ads more than 1 or 2.

Small text or improper font — The font size should be standard i.e medium. It should not be too large or too small. Also, the background color should be completely different from the font color.

Difficult Navigation and menus– The purpose of page navigation is to give users a way to keep track of their location within programs or documents. Page navigation should be dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page. Always try to give important links in the menu, don’t flood your menu with unwanted and external links. It is a bad practice.

Unnecessary use of technical jargons — People are getting confused and don’t want to deal when website developers use to geeky language, technical terms etc. So it’s better to keep the language of the site as simple as possible so that even a layman can understand. Simple and clear language should be used for writing blog articles.

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Comments

3 responses to “10 Most Hated features of a website or blog”

  1. GKtips

    Really this information is usefyll, thank you.

  2. Creatlf

    This a pretty good list of common website annoyances. My own personal worst feature are the sites that use video and/or audio files that automatically start playing as soon as a visitor lands on the page. I have personally boycotted programs such as GDI and Yuwie because I keep running into their highly annoying pages in traffic exchanges and other outlets.

    Like the previous commenter, I disagree somewhat on the blog community widgets. Although they do increase loading times slightly, for a new blogger with no previously established name recognition, these networks are a vital source of traffic, valuable connections with other webmasters, and eventually backlinks if your content is good. On the other hand, once my blog becomes popular enough and starts bringing in significant revenues, I may be able to afford the cost of dropping the widgets because the traffic decrease would not be as much of a problem.

    P.S. – It might be a good idea if you didn\’t publish our email addresses in the comments (it is visible on mouseover). We don\’t need any more problems with spam than we already have, not to mention the fact that revealing email addresses like that may discourage legitimate comments and encourage the use of junk email addresses to get around this “feature”.

    P.P.S. – Your captcha system has too short of a timeout session on it. Every time I try to submit a comment I keep getting the “wrong security code” message. I’ve encountered this before, especially when taking the time to write out longer comments. It is annoying because if I don’t save my comment text to the clipboard (or somewhere else), it is wiped out and I have to rewrite and type the comment all over again. Perhaps this should be listed as the #11 Most Hated Feature of a Blog…

  3. Hemantha

    Interesting article. I liked the reasons behind. Thanks will help me too to improve the mistakes if any.

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