Social Media PR Blog

News, opinions and tactics from EndGame PR President Steve Mullen on social media, social networking, SEO, public relations and traditional media.

Web Marketing Turnoffs

Posted: June 4th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Web Design, Web Marketing | No Comments

I happened upon a great article from Entrepreneur.com that charts their list of 13 top web site marketing turnoffs.  In my view, they almost nailed this list.  On it is at least a handful of my biggest online pet peeves.  Here’s my favorite (or is that least favorite?) on the list:

Forcing immediate registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request-after you’ve sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.

I run into this frequently on blogs that make you register before commenting.  Nothing will make me less likely to comment on your blog that forcing me to register before doing it.

The reason I said that they almost nailed this list is that I disagree with one of the points and would add two more.  I think they dropped the ball in including this one:

Friction-full commenting: “Moderated comments” is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, it should let anyone comment. Also, many times I’ve started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized I’d have to register.

Have you ever been in charge of a blog or web site that allows unmoderated comments?  Even with great spam catchers like Akismet, it’s going to be covered in comments that point to sites selling solutions for ED.  You’d spend so much time deleting those comments, that you wouldn’t have time for any kind of conversation with your legitimate commenters.

I would add the following two points to the list:

Advertisements that fly out and cover the website: Sadly, I thought of this one while I was looking at Entrepreneur’s website and an ad expanded to cover much of my screen. This one, at least, made it obvious how you could close the ad.  Some of them require several moments of close investigation before you can find the little “X”.  Bad move and irritating to the user.

Intermediate advertising pages: These are the pages you have to look at before actually seeing the content you wanted to view.  You’ll see what I mean when you follow the link to the Entrepreneur article. Many, many websites use this tactic, so don’t think I’m picking on Entrepreneur.  It’s annoying.

Here’s a link to the full article, or at least to the intermediate ad page that will lead you there.

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