Some tips are tried and true. You just can’t deny some of the factors that create a good website. I see adult sites by newcomers continuously make the same mistakes over and over again. These few tips apply whether your site is brand new or if it’s 10 years old, if it’s low traffic tiny site or if it’s a huge millions of visitors a day site. I also can usually tell when great sites add new employees as these mistakes can start insinuating themselves into what is otherwise a terrific website.

So what are these mistakes? Here goes…

1. Just Because It’s A New And Cool Thing, Doesn’t Mean It’s The Best Thing To Do To Your Website.

There are some really pretty technologies available and new things are coming out all the time. But it doesn’t mean that you should use them just because you can. Some of the coolest looking things can really negatively impact the usability of your website. Negative impact means it will work against you and you’ll lose visitors or sales. It’s really important to access the impact of a new ‘gizmo’ and how it will affect the usability of your web site. If you are going to do something new and cool technology wise.. then make sure it really is going to add value and make it easier for people to use your site. The old K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle should probably be called a ‘law’ of web design. Usually the simpler the better. I think of this as “Can my grandmother use this without me having to help her?”

2. Visitor Counters

Visitors to your website really don’t care about the other visitors (unless you make them care by using a counter). They only care about a few things. Primarily is this site easy to use, does it have what I want, is it secure, is it reliable and reputable?

If you are putting a counter up there for yourself… think of this…

If a visitor sees a low count, they will think no one visits you. They might conclude several things from this. Your service sucks. You’re new and since new businesses make more mistakes than established ones, they’ll go away. You’re new and new business go out of business, loads of new businesses fail.

The opposite is true too.. if they see a really high count. Most likely they won’t believe it. Especially if they just happened across your site and never heard of you… thus the counter is probably lying… or your just bragging… or gee why don’t you have real web stats… or… at the least it could just simply distract them from your goal of getting them to do something (buying something).

But you want the counter for yourself? so you can see how many people are visiting your site?

It’s just not advisable to have a visitor counter in the first place. There are just too many negatives to it. Use your web stats. Hey… Google Analytics is free if your host doesn’t provide web stats.

Visitor counters are a no no!

3. Copyright Statements

Everything you create and write on your web site warrants copyright declarations. So include it on every page AND keep it up to date.

4. Mindless Zombie-Like Use of Passive Verbs And Wordiness

Can you tell that this is one of my pet peeves. In grade school, I was taught to use third person case for formal writing to the world where I didn’t personally know my audience. I’m sure you were too. Your website is an intimate experience for the person sitting in front of your computer at the moment they are sitting there reading and looking at it. It’s just them and the computer screen. Your website is your face. Think of your website talking to them and write that way.

AVOID passive verbs. DO USE active verbs as much as practicable.

Active verbs add energy and attract people. Passive verbs put people to sleep.

AVOID wordiness. DO USE colorful adjectives.

Using active language will keep people’s attention on your website. The longer they are on your website, the more likely they will take an action such as sign-up or purchase.

5. Wordiness

I said this in the last point. But I have to say it again.

Long sentences are B O R I N G. Keep it short and simple. (There is that K.I.S.S. principle again.) It will be more readable and understandable. Remember the average reading level is about 8th grade.

Look at these two sentences and tell me what is more exciting…. judge for yourself.

Slowly licking the soft bud, feeling it ooze across his tongue, he felt immediate joy.

None the less, yesterday he was happy after he slowly licked the soft bud until it melted all over his mouth.

6. Long Pages

There are so many example around you. Look at a new paper.. most articles are very short. Look at ads.. they’re short. Look at the most successful websites out there… they’re short. Most pages should be one screen with no scrolling down. I’ve done surveys and statistical analysis and read books on web usability that prove … drum roll … Of all the people who visit your web page.. only 20% of them will bother to scroll down to see the next screen full of information. Of that 20% only about 5% will scroll down for another chuck of screen. That means if you’ve got a page that is 3 screens long… then only 1 out of 100 visitors will ever see that. You are better off having a couple of pages that link together. Most successful stores do this. You’ll see an overview of a product that is 1 screen in length and a more details link (that goes to a long page of DUH! more details). Most site visitors don’t bother. But a buyer may want those more details.

So don’t waste your precious time and effort on carefully crafting really long pages. Keep it short and simple. Get your message out fast. Entice them to do something fas

Let me K.I.S.S. you… put your buy buttons at the top instead of only at the bottom.

7. Call Visitors To Action

A lot of sites forget to do this very simple thing. You have to think about this one… I hope not too hard.

You need to tell your visitors what you want them to do. For example: Sign Up for my newsletter, order now, see our new items, enter our store, become a member, etc.

8. Highlight What Is So Great About You Or Your Site

People buy products and services for pleasure and to get rid of discomfort in their lives. You need to help them decide how your products or services are going to help them. And if you do something that others do, you have to help them realize that you are going to give them pleasure and get rid of some pain in their lives better than anyone can.

9. Typos and Grammar Mistakes

Typographic mistakes will be noticed immediately. Typos are considered either due to a very novice or uncaring website owner. Typos are not made by professionals in business trying to make a living. Thus when you have typos and grammar errors on your website, visitors won’t think you take your site seriously, and they won’t either. They’ll think you’ll make all kinds of other mistakes too. Like shipping to an incorrect or mistyped address… not shipping at all, or… maybe you don’t even look at your website so …

Geez.. use a spell checker.. don’t rely on it… but use it and reread things before you post them on your site. Have someone else verify anything you put out there for the world to see.

Summing It Up

These simple things will go a long way to making your site look more professional. They’re also things that can creep back into a long standing website if someone isn’t assigned to keep them in mind everyday. My sites are huge.. and we’ve got a number of employees who add content. So the task gets harder everyday.

We’ve been working on new things to help our affiliates promote www.extremerestraints.com. One of the things I wanted to add was a neat flash applet that affiliates could include on their websites. It would display the newest products we’ve added to the store and the links in it would have the affiliate code on the URLs. Sounds really neat!

Well I’ve brushed up on my flash skills and I can connect to the XML feed, show images and all that fun geeky stuff. But I ran into a security issue… we can’t just let any old flash applet connect to our store domain. It’s a HUGE security risk.

Adobe (macromedia at the time) Flash uses a thing called a crossdomain.xml file which tells flash what websites are allowed to connect in order to trade information. But you can’t just let ALL websites in to trade information because the very robust capabilities of Flash would let an unscrupulous Flash applet designer build something that can grab things like cookies and session information about the user. This can occur when the user is browsing our site and also browsing a “bad guy’s” website at the same time, if that “bad guy” had a sneaky flash applet on his website.

So that doesn’t mean that we can’t do it. It just means that we have to go to the trouble of setting up yet another domain that is separate from our store’s that will server our XML feeds to our affiliates.

Web security is such a pain! And Adobe’s institution of the crossdomain.xml quasi security method really leaves a lot to be desired. I have a hard time believing that Adobe was so narrow focused to think that website wanted to have flash on their own site.. but not distribute flash applets to feed data on other websites. Even in the early days of flash, we were doing that all the time. It’s a great way to let others promote your site!

If you are reading this… one tip… DO NOT DO THIS in your crossdomain.xml policy

<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain=”*” />
</cross-domain-policy>

This is the problem I’m talking about… it means anyone can directly access data on your website, without any prompting from the person browsing or knowing about it. And the flash applet can get info on that person as it appears as if it actually is that person doing the browsing. So.. bad guys can build nasty flash applets to do dastardly things.

I”m glad I did my homework, Youtube.com, flickr.com and myspace.com were attacked this way. They’ve all fixed it by moving the target for off site flash file to a different domain. Most of them are using something like api.flickr.com to do their flash applet feeds from.

If you want more information about the crossdomain.xml CRSF Cross Site Request Forgery exploits, you can check out the following link. I found them very readable and they made sense.

Chris Shiflett - http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/sep/the-dangers-of-cross-domain-ajax-with-flash

Julien Courvreur used flash to manipulate user accounts on flickr - http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000302.html

Adobe’s own documentation which doesn’t really describe the dangers of a wide open crossdomain.xml file - http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14213

There are a lot of other resources. You might try Googling the terms crossdomain.xml and CRSF together.

Now.. I have to think about a api domain of some sort.. sigh… our job is never done!