Lately I’ve seen a lot of examples of websites that had a great idea, but never got any return visitors. The webmasters are scratching their heads wondering what’s wrong. Some of them give up, some of them keep making small changes and some of them start spending big money on advertising. But most of them for get one very important aspect of web development - Thinking like your visitors.

Personal experience have shown to me time and time again that the number one website killer is: Bad usability. It’s easy to navigate a site that you yourself have built. You know where everything is and think your navigation is the best in the world. Well, most of the time, you’re wrong. And you are not seeing them because you know your site inside out.

Some of the things that can cause a bad experience for your visitors:
1. Web designers overestimate how web savvy the audience is and make their menus overly complicated with 3 level drop-downs, or better yet, navigation hidden behind a menu link that you have to click to see the menu.

2. Having image navigation without having a text option. I see this a lot as I’m working for a traveling website where you have to click a map to select where you want to go on holiday. You’d be surprised to know that a very large portion of Internet users don’t get that they have to click the map. And most of these people are willing to book their travel online so, in this case, it’s orders that are just lost because eventually they just give up.

3. A front page that doesn’t give your first time visitors a clear indication of what the site is about. This one will really sky rocket your bounce rate.

Think about this. Do your site have:

• A clearly define menu
• Clearly defined links
• A front page that gives first time users a good idea of what your site is about
• A highly visible search box
• A site map/ archive feature
• A home link on the logo/header

If not, consider each one very carefully. That’s all for now.