Poor Accessibility

No matter how great the website is, it is completely useless if the visitors are unable to access it. They have no option but to leave. Browser incompatibility is one of the prime reasons why website fail to be accessible. Make sure you check for compliance at the design and development stage itself so as to avoid any future issues.

Unintuitive Navigation

Navigation is a determining factor of how visitors browse through the website to find information. However, poor navigation can frustrate them and cause them to leave abruptly. Therefore, devote plenty of time and attention to design your navigation system. It should be logical as well as intuitive. If your website is fairly large, you should include a sitemap.

Over Advertising

Advertisements are an essential revenue generating source for websites. But some businesses take it overboard and paste their websites with ads all over. This highly irritates the visitors and makes them leave out off frustration. Therefore, try to limit the advertisements on your website. Avoid using overtly flashy ads that tend to distract the visitors.

Inadequate Information

Visitors come to a website looking for some or the other information and when they don’t find what they are looking for, they just choose to leave. It is very important to understand your industry audience and know their needs and requirements. Armed with this knowledge, you can cater to them more effectively and provide them with what they need.

Slow Loading Pages

This is probably one of the most common reasons why visitors leave a website. Internet users are an impatient lot. They like to find instant information and would not wait till the website loads completely. A much easier way for them is to look for information on another website. The connection speed of users also influence this. Therefore, it is important that you design pages that load easily even on slow Internet connections. Use Google Analytics to determine the percentage of users who have slow or fast Internet connections.

Automatic Audio and Video Play

Audio and video features are fast becoming popular. However, even though they are effective means of communication, leave the option for the users to decide. Don’t start music automatically and even if you do, provide an option to turn it off. Visitors can often get irritated with the uncontrolled music and videos and leave the website altogether even if the website was good enough.

A) customer is already acquainted with the product, he/she likes it and wants to buy it;
B) customer liked the information about the product and decided to buy it.

We will consider the second variant, when customer chooses some product only by description given at the site. Therefore, product description should show product to the best advantage and point at those features to which customer pays attention when visiting ordinary shop. When browsing through the web sites, customer sees pictures of goods and reads the descriptions; we can call the totality of this information “product card”.

So, at the first stage you need to make a typical product card.

Stage 1. Making product card

Product name
Product description
Composition/Characteristics
Color
Size
Price
Price with VAT
Sale price
Picture(s)

You may exclude those points which are inappropriate for you and add some additional ones. You should pay special attention to pictures of a product. If you are selling clothes, you know that appearance for customer is much more important than any other characteristics. That is why the first thing which customer should see is pictures of products. If your web site is selling CDs and/or DVDs, there should be such positions in the product card as:
- «mp3» (so that customer could listen to an example);
- Rating
- Format

We would like to pay your attention to the fact that any product should have two characteristics for sure; these are: product name and price. All the rest of characteristics depend on the industry.

Product can belong to some certain category of on-line catalog. That is why it is very important to develop such a catalog structure which can be easily understood by users.

Stage 2. Making up a on-line catalog

Any catalog consists of sections. You can use structure of some already existing catalog or make up a new one. It is worth making up (developing) a new catalog if you want to:
- sell not all of the goods, but only some part of them;
- sell goods at special price;
- hold sales and auctions.

You can include special categories such as “$20 – $50″, “$50 – $200″ sub-categories in SWIM category.

Stage 3. Links between categories/products

In case you want to offer customers additional products, you need to create links between products on the basis of some principle. For example, “swim suits” category can linked to “beach bags” category. The next stage is development of online catalog shopping, but this will be the topic of our next article.

Thus, here is the list of documents you need to develop or give to the web developers:
1) Example of current catalog of products
2) Example of product description(s)
3) Product card(s)
4) On-line catalog(s)
5) List of attendant products (or categories)

Having this information, web developers will be able to develop not only catalog design but also e-shop.

But some web masters prefer to have their own icon. Apart from being an ego issue, it makes the web site memorable, and more prominent in the list of hundreds of Favorite links (gosh! do you ever visit them?!), or repulsive if you make an ugly icon.

COMPATIBILITY

It only works with IE5 or higher versions. Otherwise browsers like Netscape Navigator and Opera do not support such an indulgence. Well, to be frank I haven’t checked with the current versions (I have IE5, Netscape 4.7 and Opera 5 on my machine). But the last time I read, more than 75% surfers are using IE5 or plus these days.

MAKING THE ICON

In the following steps, you can create an icon from your web site. This reminds me, a more complex icon can be created by a software like Microsoft Photodraw where you can first enlarge the view without distorting the pixels, create the icon, and then reduce to the normal size and then paste it into an icon editor. Look out for a similar editor if you don’t have it.

Take care that the icon you make/draw/scan/steal has a dimension of 16 x 16 pixels. Preferably, in 8-bit color.

Now go somewhere, where there are lots of downloadable programs, and download “Icon Collector Graphics Editor” from http://www.greatowl.com. I mention this software because somehow I have it on my computer, and don’t remember when I installed it. Probably I was trying to make a Favicon for myself but then changed my mind. On second look, I didn’t change my mind after all. The icon does show up if you load my web site – http://www.bytesworth.com – and maybe in buffer it doesn’t show up.

Anyway, there is another program called ForgeIcon – try to find it on Google. If you don’t want to download any program, go to http://www.favicon.com. They have an online software to help you make the icon.

Use your artistic genius to make the icon, and name it as “favicon.ico”. All icon files have the extension .ICO (but of course).

UPLOADING IT

You need to upload the icon on your server if you really want it be visible to your visitors. For that you need an FTP program. I use CuteFTP that you can probably get at http://download.cnet.com or some other free download site.

Some simple folks also use the good old browser to upload a file by simply typing the FTP path in the location bar. In the case of the browser, you just have to copy-paste the file, that is, if you have the login and password.

Then, save the favicon file in the folder where you want it to appear. For example, if you want it to appear with http://www.maindomain.com then you save the favicon file in the root folder of your server, that is, it’s path should be http://www.maindomain.com/favicon.ico. But, if you want a different icon to appear with http://www.maindomain.com/subdomain/anotherfile.html, you need to store the new icon (with the same name – favicon.ico) in the folder “subdomain”, that is, the path of the second icon file should be http://www.maindomain.com/subdomain/favicon.ico.

After this, whenever your web site is accessed, the icon shows up, and it remains there when the site is book-marked or added to the Shortcuts section of the browser.

So this is how you can create and use your own icons on your web sites.

Unfortunately, you can’t control which pages get listed under Site Links. Google automatically chooses Site Links and they change from time to time. If you do manage to get them it’s great! Having more links to your website is always great.

Adware is a program that monitors or spies on what computer users do on their computers. They then automatically install advertisements onto the computer.

Spyware and adware are similar indeed. The only difference between the two is that adware does not report to the company, instead it bypasses that and automatically loads the ads onto the computer.

The more adware or spyware that is loaded onto the computer, the longer it takes for the machine to go through its start up process. New toolbars appear in the browser. The homepage is changed and cannot be changed back. Pop-ups will not go away when the computer is running. It can slow your machine and your level of productivity down.

While you may not realize spyware has been installed on your computer, there are some signs to look for. If you notice any changes to your Web browser that you did not make — such as extra toolbars or different homepage settings — as well as changes to your security settings and favorites list, you could have spyware running on your system.