Trick not treat!
Most visitors clicking your promotions hope that you’ll offer them with some tasty treat. If instead you do things that shake their enthusiasm and frighten them from taking advantage of your offer, they’ll just bail on you no matter how delicious the treat you may be offering. In the spirit of Halloween, I’d like to offer you a chance to Trick or Treat with me.
I just stumbled across this horrifying landing page: Booo!
Can you list all the scary and ghoulish things to be found on this page? But better yet, let’s play trick or treat!
In the comments below, post a link to the scariest landing page you can find. Jeffrey and I will choose among all the people who add a link and provide a treat for the most fright inducing landing page.
Non-profits… they really do try.
http://urbanmountainadventures.org/sponsorship/
That’s pretty bad. Maybe they don’t really need the sponsorships.
Even the captcha software gets in on the act injecting it’s own slice of humour…
You noticed that too
http://bryaneisenberg.com/halloween-special-frightening-landing-pages/
Worse than the one you captured in your article…
This one may be a winner. French landing page for the keyword “lawn mower” : http://www.emc-motoculture.com/?gclid=CNv-hOblq7MCFbMbtAodhW8Adg
Searched for “video conferencing” and Cisco was the first organic hit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14522864/Video%20Conferencing%20%20%20Cisco%20Systems.png
They dump you in the scary Forest Of Long Text without a map for how you got there or where you should go except to Learn More.
That is bad, not sure it is as scary as this one though. This had more form fields than it was offering nuggets of advise.
http://plus.google.com/
As someone with FOUR separate Google accounts (one for the agency, one for my blog, one for personal, and a old gmail.com one for spam and Google+), I’m pushed to sign up from each account with no ability to manage or indicate that fact that I’m one person, who, like many people, happens to have more than one email address.
The landing page isn’t quite as scary, but the overall experience, because you come across it repeatedly through your daily work, is definitely one of the worst designed. (and I’m normally a supporter of Google’s).
I could write a whole ebook on how many challenges I have had because of that.
This is what companies do if they have no confidence in the ability of their copy to convert or they question the value of the content they are offering. It is disheartening to see this coming from Vocus.
I am really surprised a brand like Vocus, who seems to care about their reputation would subjects their prospects and customers to an experience like this.
This one is easy, just take a look at websites of government institutions. For example the Czech Ministry of Finance: http://www.mfcr.cz/cps/rde/xchg/
That is what happens when your home page is lead by a committee. Every link and content piece is important.
http://www.fabricland.co.uk/ is a personal favourite…
This reminds me of sites designed in the late 90s could easily have made it onto http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/worst-web-design-featured-on-web-pages-that-suck-in-2005.html
Closing the loop and as I said on Twitter, I’d like to thank you for the 3rd party confirmation of our plans. We’re working on a dramatic overhaul of our forms and appreciate the confirmation of the importance of that project.
We’ll give you guys access to the beta of the new forms when they’re ready.
We look forward to seeing it.
Yikes! http://www.analystsoft.com/en/products/statplus/buy.phtml
That page looks like a late night informercial sounds. But wait, there is more…
Did anyone win this? Just curious!