top 10 list of what will drive people away from your site

1) Visitor Counters. Visitors usually don't care how many other people have visited your site but I can guarantee you that if the visitor counter shows a low number, that is a really psychological turn-off to people. It shows that your website has low traffic and therefore is not very popular. If you don’t want to take the visitor counter off your site many third party counter scripts like statcounter.com offer you the possibility to hide the counter from the visitor but you can still view it from your own statcounter admin area. Also any good web host should have detailed statistics available. If not– get a new one!

2) “Under construction” signs on your website should be avoided at any cost. Websites are supposed to be “living documents” and they are supposed to change and grow over time. Under
Construction signs on your website look amateurish and if your site is not ready to show to the public, then simply DON’T!

3) Technology Overuse. Keep your website simple and easy to navigate. There are tons of really wild and cool things you can program into your website but they are only going to distract the visitor and turn the focus away from your main message. If the tech stuff is in addition slowing down the loading time of your page, ditch it in favour of a more simple design. Avoid huge flash shows, animated graphics and other large graphics, as well as automatic loading videos and audio.

4) Copyright statements. Always make sure you include copyright statements on every page, and update the year in the copyright statement as appropriate. If visitors look at your website and see that the copyright information looks like this; Copyright 1996, it’s a real turn off and it is actually screaming out loud that your website has not been updated for years! As I wrote above websites are supposed to be living documents and if it has not been updated since 1996 it is pretty dead!

5) Long sentences can kill your website. Remember; people get easily distracted. Help your visitors by keeping your sentences short and to the point.

7) Avoid Passive Verbs. If you do not know what passive verbs are you can have a look at this link:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_actpass.html
Use active sentences and active verbs on your website as they are much more powerful and give much energy to your site than passive verbs do.

8) What are the benefits of your products or services? Lack of identifying this to your customer can cause your business to fail. People make purchases for two reasons; to get rid of pain or to get pleasure. Forget about telling your possible customer tech stuff like how your “widget” is ade out of PVC with 3 inch steel plates. That’s just a bunch of crap your customer won’t care about anyways. Tell them how THEY can benefit from your products. Appeal to their feelings and emotions.

9) No Call to Action? You MUST tell your visitors what to do – in marketing that’s called a “Call To Action.” Forgetting this may result in a customer leaving before he or she has bought anything. If you tell your visitors what to do next it is much more likeable that you will see better results. Examples: “Click on the link below, Sign up to our newsletter, Call Us” and last but absolutely not least: “Order today!”

10) I have built a website, now I’ll get a bunch of visitors! You have built a website and you think you just can forget about it and visitors will come? Actually once you have built your website the hard part begins. You have to market your website in order to get traffic. There is no use in spending lots of time and a lot of green bills on creating your website if you fail to market it. You could just as well have thrown the money out the window or given it to a homeless guy, and it would actually come to better use!