You see a lot of posts everyday telling you to DO NOT EVER DO THIS! or DO NOT EVER DO THAT! This post is about How To Overwhelm Your Visitors. I will tell you how to overwhelm your visitors, and you can decide what to do to prevent that.

1. Writing over 2-3 posts per day. People cannot spend their entire time on your blog; they have others to go to too. Be considerate; If yours is too long, they will skip it entirely.
2. Too many Topsite buttons and Stat counters. Using one or two stat counters is enough. Google Analytics is a good one. MyBlogLog is another good one if you want to track where your visitors are going. If you currently have over 3-5 buttons on your blog, remove them one day at a time. For example, today, you can remove one. And another one the next day, and so on. That way your visitors won’t notice a big change.
3. Sharp colours, easy eyes. Watch your colours. Your colours should somewhat “mix” together. For example, black can go with almost any colour. Use green and purple with caution. Colour Combos is a good colour scheming site if you need help.
4. Be considerate of where people live. If your blog is intended for people in a specific place, then clearly state the information on the main page.
5. Going on and on about a particular thing. While you can call that excitement, it can also be recognized as over-reactiveness, or obsessiveness. Be careful about what you go on about; repetitiveness is also very annoying. The next half-point relates to this one.
   Constantly reporting on your “amazing” stats. A status report once a month is enough, and once a week if your blog is not over one month. One or two posts expressing your amazement to your status is enough; people will disregard them if you rave about it too much.
6. When you blog, stay on one topic and move on. This is a mistake that a lot of people make, called Rambling. It’s perfectly fine if you say that it is going to be a ramble at the beginning of the post, but when your visitors come from a search engine referral, they expect to see what they searched for, and not bits and pieces of it.
7. Using too much font decorations. This will hurt peoples’ eyes and annoy (not to mention overwhelm) them. It is very hard to read, but if you truly have good content, some visitors will copy and paste your text onto an editor like Notepad where font decorations do not exist.
8. Using animated images. It will redirect your readers’ attention to somewhere else, and most will find it annoying. Background and cursor effects have the same results.
9. Resizing their browser windows. This is the one thing that always catches people– having their browser windows resized. Most have their own preferences to what size their browser window is, and like to keep it that way.
10. Hording visitors with advertisements. People hate it when presented with too many advertisements. (e.g. visit any MySpace fansite, and you will see how far some people go.)

(View Comments…)

Comment posted by Ryan
at 6/13/2007 6:58:08 PM

I usually leave the speakers on my computer turned down just in case I come across a site that has music playing. But if they’re on and I hit a music playing site it’s a quick back button.

Although the browser window changing scripts are worse. Very few sites can get away with it. And if you can’t design a site that looks decent across different resolutions, hire someone who can.

Comment posted by Grace
at 6/13/2007 6:34:05 PM

Thomas- That’s true too. I didn’t include that because not all sites have music; the majority of sites are silent. But thanks for mentioning it.

Comment posted by Thomas
at 6/13/2007 2:55:49 PM

I agree on all these.
But you forgot the worst: Sites that have music that starts automatically! I hate them so much and hit ctrl+f4 very fast

Comment posted by Brown Thoughts » Blog Archive » Brown Batch #9: Sunday Link Love
at 6/10/2007 11:02:10 AM

[…] - How To Overwhelm Your Visitors You see a lot of posts everyday telling you to DO NOT EVER DO THIS! or DO NOT EVER DO THAT! This […]

Comment posted by » Speedlinking 10-06-2007 Ganha dinheiro online com MUIOMUIO.NET: Internet, Tecnologia e dicas sobre Blogging por Mario Andrade
at 6/10/2007 4:04:16 AM

[…] How to Overwhelm Your visitors […]

Comment posted by Weekend Links for 06/08 | PureBlogging
at 6/8/2007 9:31:42 AM

[…] tells you how to overwhelm your visitors. (Congratulations on your 1 month blog […]

Comment posted by Grace
at 6/6/2007 6:09:20 PM

Brown Baron, teddY, Erin- Thanks.

Comment posted by Erin
at 6/5/2007 2:22:16 PM

These are very good points, and I think that your list is very thorough and complete. You’ve been providing such valid and useful information lately and that’s really cool. I’m sure a lot of people who have read your blogs have benefited from what you’ve written, whether they’ve expressed that in a comment or not.

Comment posted by Brown Baron
at 6/5/2007 1:07:04 PM

Very nice list. I agree that some bloggers have a tendency to put every available badge and widget without realizing that it’s the content that’s important. Some get away with having a lot of badges mainly because it blends well with their theme.

Great post. You do know that if you make another great post like this within the week that you’ll give me a hard time choosing which one to include in my weekend list right? Haha .. nice job as always.

Comment posted by teddY
at 6/5/2007 8:02:46 AM

Agreed! All these points are very useful and valid I must say. I think the most important thing about blogging is to ensure that your visitors feel comfortable when they’re browsing through a blog - and all the criteria required for a comfortable stay are all listed in this post I must say that you’ve done a really amazing job.

I couldn’t agree more with the point about hoarding visitors with advertisements. I get really annoyed by bloggers who used way too much advertisements on their sites. I don’t mean that blog’s shouldn’t have advertisements or it is wrong for bloggers to use advertisement, but use it with caution and place them at suitable places. Do not use highly animated advertisements because it distracts your visitors and annoys them. Popups don’t work too, since either people get very annoyed or their browser’s popup-blockers will close the advertisement.

And yea I agree that blogger should not overly publicise their blog stats. The first thing is that it annoys some people because they see it as a form of showing off how popular your blog is. And too much blog stats are actually not really of good use to visitors - they are in fact more useful to the owner of the blogs themselves because they help to pinpoint particular habits of a visitor and etc.

Comment posted by Grace
at 6/19/2007 11:36:48 PM

Angie- That’s a nice one.

Comment posted by Angie Hartford
at 6/19/2007 11:25:09 PM

Best way to get people to leave your site in a hurry: reverse type. It may look cool, but illegibility is no way to build a loyal readership.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007| Category: Blog and Design Tips, Blogging Tips, Writing | Comment | Trackback