Top 10 Things to Avoid on Your Business Web Site

By Alissa Rothstein

There are many items that may be acceptable on your personal web site, but are unprofessional on your business web site. Here are the top 10 offenders:

1. Music. Nothing is more annoying than going to a web site and having to endure some bad music or midi file playing. Wait-it gets worse. Many times, there isn’t any control to turn off the sound. It’s okay to have music playing if you are a music-related site, but please give people the option to turn it off.

2. Personal Unrelated Stuff. Don’t include pictures of your children, wedding pictures, pet pictures, etc. It’s unprofessional, and it poses a possible safety issue for your family.  Don’t include any pages about your hobbies, or as I have seen on one business web site, a long tirade about your religion, with the intent to convert your visitors. Again, it’s unprofessional, and let’s face it: there are a lot of wackos out there.

3. Flash Intros. Unless you are a web designer promoting your work (and even then its borderline), don’t use a Flash intro page. It may seem like a cool thing to do, but people are busy and have the attention span of a flea. They want to get to the information they want ASAP. If you are taking up too much of their time with an intro playing, you risk losing your customer to another site.

4. Entry pages. Again, don’t waste anyone’s time with a page that has you click on an “enter here” button. Why would anyone go to your site if they didn’t want to enter?

5. Generic Email Address. Another unprofessional thing to do is to list your contact email as "jsmith@hotmail.com" or "jsmith@aol.com." Worse yet, inappropriate emails such as "sexymama@msn.com" or "partyguy@yahoo.com" definitely set the wrong tone. Again, they are fine for personal correspondence, but not for your business. Many hosting companies offer email services, along with hosting your web site. It looks better to respond to a customer inquiry with an email that reflects your web site URL, such as "jsmith@brandxyz.com."

6. Too Much Information. Don’t try to cram a lot of content onto one page. It’s better to create smaller pages that link than one huge page with a never-ending scroll bar.

7. Images not sized correctly.  Did you ever see an image on a web site that was huge and took forever to load on a page? Enough said.

8. Pop-up ads from your hosting company. If your website is constantly popping up ads from your hosting company, it will become pretty apparent to your customers that you are using a low-budget free service. It makes you look cheap and your company look cheesy. Definitely not the impression that you want to convey.

9. No contact info. No email address, no phone number and no address. How are people supposed to contact you-smoke signals? Preferably, some form of your contact info, whether it be an email or phone number, should appear somewhere prominent on every page so that customers don’t have to hunt it down.

10. Broken links. Check your links on a regular basis to make sure that they are active and going where they are supposed to go. This is especially important when you have external links to another site. There are many instances where a web site ceases to exist, and if you link to them, you are sending your customers on a wild goose chase to a nonexistent page. Worse, it is a bad reflection on you and your inability to maintain your web site. If you get rid of pages from your website, it would be a good idea to put up a “redirection page” in its place to your home page or the page that took its place.

About the Author
Alissa Rothstein is a marketing, graphic and web design expert who uses her expertise to effectively help people and small businesses market themselves more strategically by offering complete communication services that include, but are not limited to graphic design, web design, SEO/web marketing and Public Relations.