Okay, we know we all need to pay the bills. I know that many of us want to get traffic to our web sites. And some of us just want to make enough money to pay for our costs so that this thing we love to do is free.
But, come on, that doesn’t mean you should plaster a hundred ads or a dozen banners on every page of your web site. A banner here and there, a small button or a few text links is fine, but I’ve seen some web sites that have dozens and a few that have hundreds of ads on each page! Now this is just tacky and is virtually guaranteed to get your visitors to hit that handy back button fast.
Some common things on web site that you should never do.
- Banner exchanges – It’s real simple – these do not work. Oh, you will get a click or two, but banner exchanges tend to look tacky, take up valuable space on your web pages and increase your load time. Don’t even bother putting even one of these on your entire web site.
- Notices saying “please, pretty please, keep my site free and click on something”. This just makes you look like a rank amateur.
- Pornographic ads (unless your site is a pornographic site) – You want to chase away your visitors fast, then include pornographic ads. Yeah, you might get a few dollars from them, but you will lose visitors and your site will not be “family safe”, which can be important.
- Web sites that are just advertisements – I suppose there is a place for brochures or full site advertisements, but I personally hit the back key as soon as I run into one of these. I want content. If I wanted this many advertisements I’d buy a magazine or look in the classified section of the newspaper.
- Any large graphic advertisements. Remember one of the very important things in web design is load time. Your site must load fast. If you include large graphic ads you are increase your load times.
- Sites which are just lists of pay-surf, MLM or other money making schemes. There is nothing wrong with include some pay-surf or MLM ads here and there on your site. Including a section on these programs is also fine. But come on, please put some real content there also. Otherwise people will hit the back key fast and never come back.
