1. Requiring a login or a particular blog account to comment
Slowing people down only frustrates them. Make comments and contacts easy.
2. Advance “Payment”
Requiring (an email address or a sign up) before a visitor can watch your demo, check out your reel, or see your designs
3. Broken links
Nobody can interact with your site or buy your products if they can’t find them. Here’s a free tool to check your Web site.
4. Flash intros
These irritate people more than I can say; you’re forced to watch something with no way out. Auto play and sound is even worse. Just say no.
5. Asking for Twitter followers upfront
Establish trust first. Let people get to know you (and your great content) before you ask them to follow you.
6. Contact forms with lots of fields
The more information you ask for (name, address, phone, state, city, country, zip, blood type…OK, I’m kidding about that last one), the less likely people are to fill out your form. Keep it to a minimum.
7. Leaping before you look
Habitat UK jumped into Twitter and began their tweets with popular hashtags (alert symbols meant to help people follow conversations on a particular topic on Twitter) that had nothing to do with furniture.
8. Talking camera, design, or web geek instead of English.
Your customers don’t care about your cool tools. They care about what those cool tools can do (holes, not drills).
9. Too much information
I was recently asked to review a site that had 45 links on the left-hand menu and another 37 on the right. My head was spinning. Keep it simple. If you’ve got lots of links, put them under pop-out sub-menus.