by Paul Sullivan

#10 Road Rage

Flashing graphics, distracting ad boxes and icons that make your eyes hurt and your heart race. It’s like looking into your rear view mirror and seeing your ex-wife. You don’t know whether to speed up or drive into the ditch.

#9 Search Engines That Don’t

You finally find the search button, but it finds the wrong stuff. Or you can’t tell the search results from the ads. Search for ‘suicide’ and see how many ‘To Buy Suicide, Click Here’ results you get.

 #8  Skip the Fireworks, Please!

Your site may feature the latest graphics and technology, but if I’m held hostage for two minutes waiting for the Flash intro to complete, I’m not going to wait. What’s the point of creating an intro so elaborate you have to create a ‘Skip Intro’ button?

 #7 Nasty Surprises

You’re on a site when, suddenly, another window pops up containing a VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE! It used to be that only porn sites stooped to this level.

 #6 Stuff That Doesn’t Work

Shopping baskets that won’t fill or can’t be emptied. Features that never finish loading. Webcasts with no broadcast. Frozen Flash movies. Links that won’t. Rollovers that don’t.

 #5 CobWeb Sites

These sites display scanned versions of brochures or feature out-dated information and links. Many cobweb sites we viewed last year are still there, frozen in time. What message are you sending if your site’s information is out-dated or the links are broken? If the people who run a site don’t visit it, why should I?

 #4 Interactive It’s Not

We all know that there are many ways to be interactive. Yet all you get is a lousy ‘Contact Us’ button. With all the hype about customer relations on the Net, how come I have to e-mail my questions to ‘info’? Who’s ‘info’?

 #3 Lost in Cyberspace

Sites that are difficult to navigate, sending visitors to dead ends and not allowing them to return Home.

 #2  Gobbledygook 

Using web jargon and buzz words, companies obscure their purpose till no one knows what they are. What’s wrong with simple English?

 #1  Out of Focus!

‘We’re a portal and community with e-commerce and reference and we have travel and research and business and Frisbee and we have a 24-hour sports ticker!’ No site can be all things to all people.

With seven million new sites coming on-line daily, companies need to formulate their web strategies carefully. With so many bells and whistles available, people forget that the Internet is first and foremost a communications medium. Elaborate graphics and features are useless if no one can figure out what you’re saying. Research clearly shows that people are frustrated with on-line interaction, which may explain the recent demise of so many dot.com enterprises.