There are so many web sites to explore, visitors to your site will soon leave if it does not suit their purpose, or the site has difficulties for them. What is straightforward to you, may not be to a new user.

Difficult or confusing navigation. Always show your navigation bar, or at the very least, a way to get back to the Home Page. Site maps are great for a site with lots of pages.

Slow loading web pages. Too many large images will cause this. Keep images to a minimum, use thumbnails where possible.

Unnecessary pages eg a front cover with no information, to a visitor, just means another click for no reason.

Jarring colours, or too many colours.

Too many different fonts. Keep it simple, keep it clean.

Large screens on smaller monitors that need to be scrolled from left to right. A good rule of thumb is to size your pages to suit the now standard 800 x 600 pixels.

Pages that are too long without any way of quickly getting back to the top or bottom of the page, necessitating the user to scroll down or up a long way. Use anchors, such as Back To Top, if you must have a long page, or separate the content into several pages.

No explanation of your web site at the top of the home page. Visitors need to know what your site is about, very quickly - whether it is worth their time to browse any further.

Broken links to both internal and external pages. All links should work.

Forms that don’t work. These invariably end up at an error page, and are very frustrating to visitors.

No page uniformity. Ensure all pages follow a similar colour scheme, or theme that signals to a visitor they all belong to the same site.

Too many animations and flashing components. While one or two can be very effective, too many can jar the eye.

Too many ads, especially banner ads.

Difficult to read - if the font is too small, or the colour is close to the background colour, or the background consists of an image that fights for attention with the text.

The 'trick' is to view your web site as a first-time visitor would. Asking an impartial friend to do this for you can be an enormous help, as this person will see things with a different eye. In fact, ask several, as each will add invaluable feedback.

Written by Margo Courtney, author of the "How To Build Web Sites" tutorial. It explains in plain english, and step by step, how to create, host and market web sites. The tutorial can be viewed at http://www.how-to-build-web-sites.com and its aim is web page success. She also designs and builds web sites, and offers other web site services.

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