5 Ways To Annoy The Crap Out Of Your Visitors

Making visitors to your website feel comfortable and welcome is crucial to online success.  It is much easier for people to click the back button than it is for them to walk out of an actual store or brick and mortar office.  After all, they didn’t spend the time and $5.00/per gallon in gas to get to your website like they would have if they had travelled to your physical location.  The only thing they have invested is the minuscule amount of energy it took to click the mouse a few times - no big deal to back out and pretend they were never there.

The best way to make sure they bail out of your site without ever acting on your call to action (buying something, contacting you, downloading your free report, signing up for a newsletter, etc..) is to annoy the crap out of them.  Here are 5 sure fire ways to do that… 

1. Use Flash Intros - You have about 3 seconds to convince your visitors to stay on your site.  (And that will usually only hold for another 3 seconds unless you can convince them again to stay even longer.)  You can take up that 3 seconds with a fancy flash intro that they can’t get out of and don’t care to see.  The first thing a visitor wants to see is whether the site is relevant to what they are looking for.  Since most flash intros are designed not to convey information, but instead are an attempt to impress the visitor with graphics and music, you can annoy them by using them right when they arrive at your site.  They are like showing commercials in your store.  You have already got the person there, you don’t need to show them another commercial when they walk in the door.  Personally, if I want graphics and music I’ll watch a Disney movie.  I  don’t even like the flash intros that I can get out of easily, but if you must have one you can make it a little less annoying by making sure the “Skip This Intro” button is clearly visible. 
2. Play Music - Nothing is more annoying than a website with music on it.  Oh wait… yes there is… a website with music on it that you can’t turn off.  In the offline world music is used in offices, stores and restaraunts for various reasons - make the customers relaxed, get them in and out quickly, make them want to stay awhile, make the store appeal to a certain demographic, etc.  This does not translate to the online world.  You need to set the tone of your website with your graphics, content and navigation.  Playing music just annoys the crap out of people and drives them away.
3. Clutter Your Landing Page - If you really want to annoy people make sure your landing page is so filled with graphics, ads, and content that their eyes hurt just thinking about trying to find what they are looking for.  When someone lands on your page they need to be able to immediately see that the page is relevant to what they are looking for, feel that they are on a professional site of a professional company and feel comfortable and confident enough to delve deeper into the site.  You want their brain to say, “Ah, this is nice.  I think I will stay awhile.”  Unless of course, you want to annoy the crap out of them… then you want their brain to say, “Aargh!  What the hell is this?  Back! Back!”
    
   The above 3 things you can do to annoy the crap out of your visitors can be done in the first 3 seconds that they land on your page. However, if they make it past those you still have a chance with these. 
4. Hide From Your Visitors- Although people have gotten more comfortable doing business online, they still need to be reassured that there is a real company behind the site.  So if you really want to annoy them, act smarmy and hide.  You can make your contact page difficult to reach by only giving it a small text link in the footer of your page.  Another really irritating thing you could do is not have a toll free number for people to call and only be reachable by email.  This will most likely annoy them enough to make them leave.
5. Keep Things Long and Complicated - If you have not annoyed your visitors enough and they have made it to your sign up/order/action page, don’t fret.  You still have a chance to annoy the crap out of them and make them leave.  Here’s what you do - make them jump through hoops to do business with you.  This means making your order page 4 pages long and require everything from their mother’s maiden name to their shoe size a required field.  The more complicated things are and the more barriers visitors run up against, the less likely they are to follow through with your call to action.  Although they want things simple and uncomplicated, they also want a lot choices when it comes to payment options.  So make sure to only accept 1 major credit card if you really want to annoy them enough to bail out.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of annoying things you can do on your website and these are just a few of them.  What’s your best advice on how to annoy your visitors?

Reader Comments

Russ Emrick says...July 23rd, 2008

Great post - content and humor. Has an edge of sarcasm that really spices it up. Thanks.

I agree 100%. And it’s getting worse. My favorites are misleading keywords (link baiting), content empty Adsense sites, and all kinds of tricks. So now we not only have sites that drive us a way screaming “save me, save me” we have these time wasting search engine hogging marketers.

All of your issues drive me nuts. My favorite annoyances (since you asked) are dark fonts on dark backgrounds, unreadable strange fonts, buttons that you can’t figure out, and websites where you either get lost or can’t figure out what you need to do.

I wrote a whole article on this as well but I’m not trying to spam you here so I won’t include the link.

Thanks again. Cheers..Russ

Brandi Cummings says...July 23rd, 2008

Ah yes, text in colors and fonts that look like they should be on a teenager’s MySpace page are definitely up there on the list of annoying things. Thanks for adding it to the list.

Got something to say?

Name (Required)*

Email Address (Required)*

Website

Comments (Required)*

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

Copyright © 2008 Telecentrex, LLC. All rights reserved.