Install a script to disable everyone's right mouse click button.
When someone tries to right-click, be sure to pop up a really insulting warning that accuses them of trying to steal your secret HTML code. Disabling the right click button will allow you to: keep the visitor from:
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bookmarking your site
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using the forward and back browser functions
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opening your links in a new window
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stopping a slow loading or hung page, etc, etc
Admittedly the visitors can do all of these things with the buttons at the top of the browser, but maybe they won't know that and simply go away as you intended when you disabled their dangerous right-click button.
Create a really long page then start playing your favorite song
and put the stop and volume controls at the very bottom of the page . This will make sure they do one of the following:Listen to the entire song all the way through 5 times while reading your content, which proves them worthy of experiencing your site
- Try desperately to find the Stop button
- Go somewhere else to stop the song from playing.
Decide in advance what screen resolution your visitors must use in order to see your pages.
It is absolutely a great way to drive them off when they have to scroll from side to side to read sentences of information.You can make this 100% effective by making your pages so wide that no monitor can display it.
Don't just settle for just one obscure browser plug-in.
Go for the gold. Use several bloated plug-ins that no one has already installed.This should drive away all newbies because they usually have no idea how to install even one plug-in, much less three.
Experienced surfers will be glad to spend 20 minutes installing plug-ins to view your unique content.
Create really challenging links strategies.
Have lots of pages that do not link back to your home page.
This way they look around for a while, then resort to the back button. This works very well when people bookmark a page. Then they have to figure out a strategy for getting any more information from your site.
And, by all means, do NOT put your navigation on every page--this blows the whole concept of challenge.
For additional challenge, make the links you do have on a page to pages that do not exist.
People will giggle when they fall into that "404" trap, and they realize they were dumb.
There is an extension to this that you can use too. When you send out emails, don't have a signature at the bottom with a link to your site. This way when they get your email, they have to figure out who it was from, and what site they are getting a response from.
They will feel really great about themselves when they can figure this out by themselves--and they will feel better about you too!
Never put your email address or 'snail mail' address on your site
(especially not on a 'Contact Us' page linked from the front page).
Nobody really needs to contact you, and they've got no need for the extra feeling of 'security' that a proper address provides. Same with telephone numbers.
Provide no method other than credit card payments for people to buy things off you.
Checks/cheques are out-moded and should be abolished at once. After all, everybody has a credit card (especially in Europe)....
Don't tell people that you only ship to the USA/Canada.
Wait for them to send you the order, you to process the credit card details and then, just as you are about to post it, inform them you can't send it.
Use mouse trails that pulsate and follow the user throughout the site!
It has really worked for my current employer to drive users away from our site. That is, if the revolving, dot-matrix clock telling me the local time didn't do it first!
Ask for their email for "upcoming events that might be of interest to you", and send them ads
(I think you can get paid now –– like 2 cents for every person you send an ad to for some services...
When the visitor arrives at your site, be sure to pop up at least two ads behind their browser window and a minimum of two ads in front of their window .
This will give them lots of options in where to go now that they have been sufficiently irritated to desire to leave right away.
Even more important is the way you treat the occasional hard case that actually stays on your site after all of your efforts. When they leave, remind them to never return.
Start popping up windows all over their monitor with windows that multiply every time they try to close them.
Sign up to use a really slow-loading hit counter and put the button inside of a TABLE so that nothing appears until the hit-counter responds.
This is possibly the best way to keep visitors from stealing from you as it keeps them from even reading your content and possibly typing it into their site from memory.
For this to work reliably, you must avoid putting the height and width into the call for the hit counter graphic.
You can improve the effectiveness of this technique by inserting not only a hit counter button, but a long string of banner exchange banners.
Ask lots and lots of personal questions.
Don't just ask for their email address.
Ask for their mailing address, phone number, sex, age, hobbies, religion, race and some other things best not discussed here.
This technique works equally well when applied to your order forms and minimizes your trip to the UPS office to ship products.
You've got to have a Splash Page.
Lots of slow loading animation. If you can combine this with the requirement to download another obscure plug-in, you'll have hit a home run.
I'm especially impressed by the many sites that have upped the ante to include two splash pages before you ever get to even the first word of content.
Make your background dark and your text just a shade or two brighter.
This makes it impossible to read your text and will rid you of visitors before they have a chance to clog up you server logs. If this is not possible on your site, use the alternate technique of putting most of your content in PDF files so that the visitor has to download them and launch another application. Very effective.
Never include the price of your products on the same page as the description of the product.
To satisfy the lawyers, you'll need to put the prices somewhere on the site, but a good hiding place is the Shopping Cart.
Your customers will never think to look there because they want to know the price before they agree to buy.
Make especially sure your visitors remain clueless about the shipping charges until they have completed their order .
Then they are overjoyed to discover the shipping charges are twice the cost of the product.
Don't reveal which credit cards you accept until visitors have gone through the first 3 screens of your checkout program .
This is especially useful if you do not accept American Express like the people at http://www.half.com
(A prize is offered to the person who works out how many of these methods are used on this site)
Let's face it. It is really hard to come up with new ways to fully irritate visitors to your site.
These tips are not in order according to their effectiveness, however #1 is by far the most effective.
For 100% effectiveness, use any three of these techniques.
Promote your Mission statement
Start off every site with your Mission Statement to show your enterprise gets into every business fad that comes along. I know one e-commerce website that has both a MS and a Vision Statement.
Also mention you donate a portion of your revenue to a charity. Of course, don't say how much.
Better yet, donate a portion of PROFITS to charity and pay yourself a million a year salary, eliminating a profit.
Use a repeating one-pixel-background.
This makes scrolling impossible on most computers.
Allow your visitors to sign-up for your "super smashing great" weekly newsletter ,
and then fill said newsletter with one sentence from you, a list of potentially interesting articles in the contents details, and then a tonne of advertising links the whole way down. But also include an "unsubscribe" link that, when clicked on, creates a pop-up window that does absolutely nothing...
Use JavaScript to put the current date and time on your page,
and then don't update anything on the site for a few months or yearsWelcome to my Site! Today is 2/13/2001 and it's 5:05pm!
News: 6/20/1999 I'm sorry I haven't updated this site in a while, I am working on a New Site Design! Stay Tuned!
Use really t-i-n-y type as a "design element."
And use CSS to make sure they can't enlarge the fonts. The heck with trying to read it -- they should be admiring your sophisticated design!
Corollary: all designers should have extra-large monitors set at stratospheric resolutions, and by no means should they ever test their designs on "normal" sized monitors and resolutions. After all, the Web is not about communication, it's about design.
Use enough JavaScript code to make even the most accomplished pro at Microsoft 'ooh' and 'ahh' in appreciation of your incredible programming skills.
Be sure to combine sufficient popup alert boxes (with requisite nonsensical messages), scrolling DHTML news panels, slide out menus, rollovers, image swaps and script errors to create a veritable hodgepodge of aneurysm inducing effects which will have them running for cover -if not killing them outright.
Make the first, second and third links on your homepage point to a single page that simply states "Under Construction. Will be completed March 1998."
Only the fourth, fifth, etc. links on your home page should actually point to content. Boring and passé, but very effective.
Have a black Flash animation on a black BG splash page load for 5 minutes while forgetting to insert a preload message. .
Leaving the only way for the visitor to "discover" that you have a "cool" intro loading for them, is by right clicking and viewing your source
Furthermore, when it does load by no means should you insert a "skip intro" button. This way everyone will admire your vectored image design skills.
Be sure to use that nifty Java lake applet that makes your logo or images look cool.
Also be sure you have at least 2-3 other Java applets running on the same page also.
Use Java Applets - real Java. Make them long and complicated so that they take years to load.
Don't forget to put a few programming errors in them - people will HATE it when after 5 minutes they discover that they waited so long just in order to be able to look at an empty grey box instead of the detailed menu you promised them!
Do NOT provide alternative non-Java means to navigate or otherwise get at the content of your site. What is also good is if the applet is so buggy that their browser crashes.
Combine the Java deterring method with the splash page method to irritate your visitors and they will never, ever come back!
Writing titles of pages, text URLs thread topics in caps.
Really tells you visitors you stand firm on your beliefs.
Make sure your site is colorful!
Use vast expanses of super-bright colours that cause them to strain and squint.
Give them that staring-into-the-sun effect, and use text colours that force their eyes to constantly readjust as they try to read your text.
Remember, you are not giving them a real "Web experience" unless looking away from the screen causes their colour perception to shift dramatically.
Don't forget to use redirects on your links from your home page!
This is especially successful when the redirect provides no means of getting back to the page your visitor started at.
Don't forget, they never wanted to explore any other areas of the site anyways.