Top 5 Reasons Your Website Sucks

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to a number of small business owners about their websites. As a freelance web designer, I’ve been primarily targeting local small businesses because many of them don’t have websites; the few that do often have an amateur design that hasn’t been updated since 1998.

Believe it or not, the sales process has been relatively tricky. Although many small business owners are keenly aware of the benefits of a professional website, many others don’t seem to care. These people often manage their website themselves and are convinced that they don’t need an upgrade.

The sad truth is that your visitors do form an immediate opinion of your business when they see your website. This first impression can be the difference between gaining or losing a customer!

Without further adieu, I give you the five top reasons why your website sucks:

It Gives Me a Seizure

If your website uses more than 3 colors for its text, has animated GIF images, uses scrolling marquees or blinking text… your website sucks!

Let’s be honest here: your visitors are so overwhelmed by color and animation that they don’t know where to look. This isn’t good! If they can’t find the information they’re looking for, they’ll search for your competitors.

It Uses Frames

If your site uses the HTML tags frame or frameset… your website sucks!

Frames are about the worst thing you could use to build your website. For starters, search engines can’t crawl your content when it’s loaded inside an HTML frame element. Frames aren’t consistently rendered in every browser, so your website might look even worse than it already does. Frames confuse your visitors as the browsers “Back” button now does something different than expected. Frames don’t print as expected. Frames often cause scrollbars to appear. Frames are also a security risk to your browser.

If those weren’t enough reasons to avoid frames, consider this: HTML5 won’t support them.

Browsers Murder It

If your website doesn’t look the same (and work) across all of the Web browsers that (at least) 90% of your visitors use… your website sucks!

This is the hardest thing for do-it-yourself webmasters to understand: building a website is harder than you think. Things that look fine in Internet Explorer often don’t look the same in Firefox, Chrome, Safari or any of the other Web browsers available… and I haven’t even mentioned mobile devices!

It’s important to know what browsers most of your visitors use so that you can test your website and be sure it looks fine. If your customers think your website sucks, what will they think about your business?

It Doesn’t Tell Me Anything

If your website doesn’t give me the information I’m looking for… your website sucks!

Are your business hours listed? What about your address and phone number? What is it your company actually does?

The answers you need to provide may vary, but it’s important to give the public what it wants. Furthermore, your content needs to be well organized so that these answers can be easily found! If your customers can’t find the information they need from you, they’re going to check out your competitors.

It Uses Flash

If your website is heavily reliant on Flash… your website sucks!

Companies often ask about Flash because it looks cool. And it often does… but websites that rely on Flash to display important content have several serious failures.

First of all, many mobile devices can’t display Flash. The iPod and iPhone can’t display Flash at all – a huge problem given how many people use them.

Secondly, Flash isn’t easily indexed by the search engines. Google says it can read text embedded within Flash files, but regular HTML text is far easier for them (and the other search engines) to read and understand.

Lastly, do your visitors actually like having to wait for your Flash animations? Many websites that use Flash go overboard using everything from background music to animated page movements. Your visitors are looking for something specific – do you really want to make them wait for it?

What do you think?

Do you agree or disagree with this list? Did I miss anything?