SDP Labs

Studies has shown that when a visitor visits a website, the decision whether he is going to stay on the website or not is taken with in 10 seconds. It means that the website creators have only 10 seconds to impress the visitors and to make sure that they stay on the website.

Now, as a user what is the first thing which bound you to stay on the website?

The answer is very simple and yet ignored by most of the website creators; it’s the design of a website. No one pays attention to functionality or content at first sight but it’s the design which actually bounds a visitor to stay on the website.

There are few miscues that are often committed while designing a website.

• Slow Response Time: Internet users are highly impatient. If they can’t view your website pages straight away, there is high possibility that they leave your website and go to another one which is more users friendly. There is also possibility that they probably would never return back to your site.

A million dollar question is how to avoid slow response time?

Firstly, try to avoid large graphics on the site pages. Instead, use small icon that connects to large graphics or you can even use various web graphic optimizer tools to reduce the files size.

Server performance also effect the response time of website. Sometime building a page involves connection to database servers which results in slowing down the process.

The bottom line is users don’t care why response time is slow. Slow response time always cause loss

In traffic, so invest your time in thinking how you can optimize the response time.

• Browser Compatibility: When we talk about browser usage you can’t expect all the people to be using common browser. In general Internet Explorer, Firebox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera make up more then 95% share of internet browsers. Therefore, it becomes important that your website is usable across all major web browsers.

There is no need to install the entire major browser on your personal machine. There are number of other resources available. You can use Adobe Browser Lab, Browser Shots, Browser Camp and Browser Sandbox. These resources can help you to test your website on multiple browsers.

• Dead Links: Dead or broken links on the website pages puts bad impression on visitors. It results in losing the traffic as well as sales. But the most adverse impact is that search engines are unable to list your page if it contains any broken links. So avoid dead links on your website pages.

You can also work on error page to turn it into not-so-irritating page. You can do this by using following tips:

1. Make sure that your error page resemble to your webpage.
2. You can provide a search box on error page so that the users can search what they are looking for.
3. Provide links which can take user back.
4. You can also provide a contact form which user can fill in and let you know the cause of error so that you can fix the problem for future.