Gone in sixty seconds, what to avoid on your site!

I’m not going to talk about movies here. It’s how to make your site visitors leave in seconds and never come back! Unfortunately, I did not invent those techniques, they are everywhere on the Internet. I just rounded them up for you, so read on (and avoid!).

HTML: A web page is like a word document, if you can use MS Word, why not use MS Front Page and create a website in minutes? You don’t have to learn any of the HTML tags. It’s boring and it takes time.

Colors: You have to be unique, so never use the usual color schemes: light background with a dark colored font, it’s everywhere on the internet and you have to be new. Use your imagination like a RED background with a GREEN font color! Also, never use blue for links and most importantly: use the same color for visited and unvisited links, so that people visit the same page hundreds of times. Remember: standards are boring, be unique.

Marquee, blink and animated GIFs spice up your site so use them a lot. Use one or two fixed words in a marquee, for example: “Welcome” or “Hello” and have them move all the time from the right of your site to the left, also place at least three animated GIFs close to each other and make all your headers blink.

Advertisements: Place three or four banner ads at the top of your page one after another and force people to scroll (a lot) to get to your content. You worked a lot on your site so you deserve a lot of money. Fake messages are the best, put one that says: “You have been infected, click here to scan your computer” also, you can put one that says: “Congratulations! You have won $1,000,000, click here to take the money now” “. Remember, the more zeros, the better!

Background sound: Insert the song that you like the most in all your pages. You love it, so visitors should love it too; there’s no reason why you shouldn’t wait five or even ten minutes for it to load. Also, make it hidden so there is no way they will stop it. Force them to listen to the same song every time they visit your site or refresh the page.

Flash is the trend, insert a five minute intro flash video and NEVER give users the option to skip it, they have to watch it every time they visit your site.

Links: Open all the links on your site in new browser windows, so that when users leave your site, they have at least 20 browser windows to close.

Photos: Add a large image of yourself to the index page of your site. It’s your site, people want to see what it looks like for sure and if you’re building a site for your business, add a very large image of the president, guaranteed boost!

Horizontal displacement bar: You have a 21-inch monitor and your site looks good on it. You like to use the highest resolution possible. Don’t even worry about “poor” people having to use the horizontal scrollbar with the vertical scrollbar to see your content. They have to buy bigger monitors, it’s their fault, not yours!

test your site only in Internet Explorer. You don’t even care how your site looks in other browsers. Why would people use other browsers anyway? IE is free, it comes with windows and most importantly: You like it!

Finally, you don’t have to use all those techniques; just choose two or three of them. Guaranteed results for your visitors!