Your Website, Is It Like a 5 Year Old?

When my children were five, they acted up and had several bad manners. My wife and I have worked hard to try and correct their behavior.

When the web was new, many sites exhibited bad manners, such as pop-ups when you closed a window. That has changed, very few sites do that anymore, although many websites still exhibit one form or another of bad manners.

Does Your Website Interrupt Visitors?

Do you know children that run up to others and shout to get attention? There are many websites do that with audio, flash splash pages or ads.

I have seen a trend on news sites to display advertisement that covers up the content of an article.The visitor must find the "Close" button to go back to reading the article.

A note to advertisers - I don't pay attention to these ads. If I see one, I close is as soon as possible, without paying attention to the content. My guess is I am not the only one who does this.

Your money might be better spent elsewhere.

Related to this are websites that automatically start to play audio or run a video with sound when a page loads. Sometimes there is no way to turn off the sound, other times the "Off" or "Mute" button is not obvious. These auto-play audio tracks are just plain annoying.

Does Your Website Ignore Visitors?

Have you ever seen a child that is so excited to tell you something they do not pay attention to what you are asking? Websites do this all the time.

If someone searches on Google for Pink Elephants, and clicks on a link to visit your site they are saying, "I'm interested in Pink Elephants, please tell me about Pink Elephants."

If a site shows a splash ad before the content, they are ignoring the visitor's request for information. Even with a skip this ad button, these splash ads are annoying.

Why Should You Care?

Last year, Google did some research on the ads which play on Youtube. They found that a 15 second ad resulted in a 15 percent abandon rate.

A Tip to Skip Video AdsYou can often skip video ad's by clicking on your computers "F5" button and reloading the page. This doesn't work as well on splash page ads.