Welcome to My Website. Please Leave. You have spent a lot of time, money and energy luring me to your website. You’ve blogged, tweeted, facebooked. You’ve written articles. Maybe you even invested in Adwords. So why are you driving me away? You’re not, you claim. But you’re wrong. Here are three reasons guaranteed to send me somewhere else. I’m too sexy for the web Flash is cool. It’s hip. It’s, well, “flashy.” I hate it. Flying mottos and morphing logos don’t amuse me. Chances are I came to your site for information: your products or services, how-to…, where to find…, gossip—you get the picture. I did not arrive to watch some inane 15-second flash intro that tells me nothing I want to know or—worse!—assaults me with a 15-second ad. If I want entertainment I’ll watch TV. Here are two factoids you may not know about flash: 1) it’s a memory hog and 2) Google doesn’t index flash, so any information included in a flash presentation is invisible to Google. So unless you’re a design firm or you produce flash programs…I’m gone. I dare you to read this Art directors love reverse type because it looks good. It looks smart. It’s tres chic. And I’d approve if text were just another design element. But it isn’t. Consider: if content is king…why on earth would you produce content that’s hard to read? Reversed type—white type on a black background—causes eye strain, especially on a computer screen. But wait, it gets worse. I’ve seen websites with yellow type on brown backgrounds, black on brown, white on yellow. And just to dig the knife in a little deeper, some even reduce the type size! Doesn’t anyone read their website? Don’t they see it’s unreadable? Don’t they care?

I know the excuse: black on white is boring. It’s expected. It’s been the same for 500 years. It needs to change. No, it doesn’t. Unless you make your text easily readable…I’m gone. I have no idea why your site exists Have you ever been on The Date from Hell or cornered by The Most Boring Human Being on Earth who drone on endless about themselves and positively dare you to get a word in edgewise (as if anyone were interested in you). Too many website landing pages are like that. They talk about who they are, how long they’ve been in business, what they’ve accomplished. They may even have a photo of their building. (Oh look Doris! Let’s go there on our next vacation.) Reality check: You’ve got about six seconds to convince me to stay on your site. If you tell me your company

…is a world leader in widget technology that focuses on innovative next-generation solutions that improve production and leverage best-of-breed processes to deliver cost-effective, value-added outcomes…

…I’m gone. If you act mysterious or coy, I’m not going to drill down into you site thinking “oh boy oh boy, I can’t wait to find out what they do.” Instead I’ll leave. Like most web nomads I’m impatient. I want what I want instantly. If I wanted leisurely I’d use a dial-up modem. When I arrive at your site I want to know two things:

1. What you do. 2. What you can do for ME.

Give me that information clearly and succinctly, provide easy-to-use navigation bars so I can dig deeper if I want, and I’ll linger. Otherwise I’ll be on your competitor’s site before you can finish picking the low-hanging fruit.