How many websites have you visited this week alone and quickly exited? What made you leave?

Was it the lack of a photo at the top of the blog post or better yet the last blog post is dated July of last year and it’s April?

Maybe you started to read the post and got side tracked by the ding of your Inbox alerting you that possibly something else more interesting had arrived?

When you stop and think about it your readers are no different from you. Some days they’re inspired and have the patience for a website that loads slow and other days 3 seconds is way too long.

Take a look around your website and think long and hard about what you’ve got going on. Or better yet ask a friend or someone who rarely uses the Internet to head to your website while you look over their shoulder and watch what they do. Oh this will help you understand what keep it simple really means for your website.

When I was a programmer we would test our code, but we’d also have to go through user testing as well. You see because we programmers knew how to make it work our test was a joke. The real test was when the folks who had to use it got it. We’d always say play with it, try to break it, and then we’ll know if it’s time to proceed. Keeping things simple always worked best.

Did you know the less choices someone has the more likely they are to choose? Take a look at the share methods you’ve got on your website. Here we’re using SexyBookMarks and have only a small handful of options For sharing. Have you seen this used but instead of 5 or 6 choices there are rows and rows of share methods. Can you imagine? It’s overwhelming. Eliminate the smorgasbord and go with the most commonly used options.

How to lose a visitor in 3 seconds or less:

• There’s nothing that appeals to the eye in your blog posts (i.e no image).
• You’ve deserted your website. The last post on the homepage has last year’s date on it.
• Your website takes too long to load. For fun, check your time here.
• It’s too complicated to navigate. Put things where people naturally expect to see them. Although you may read from right to left the naturally eye falls to the right first.
• You provide too many options for doing something (i.e all of the share options are listed).

Now it’s your turn share what turns you off when visiting a website.

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