How the wrong kind of hyperlink can piss off your customer

[Victor]

Chances are that if you are guilty of this type of hyperlink faux pas, you have an up to date - and probably modern - computer. Either that, or you are a victim of the most unspeakable types of spam email possible. Regardless, if you want to really piss off a few potential clients - and I mean make them run for the TV - NEVER distinguish between hyperlinks leading to html pages, and PDF files. Sounds silly, right?

Do you have any idea how many times adobe acrobat has crashed my computer when opened by a sneak PDF link? Sure, it is my fault, I have an older version of acrobat and am to lazy to care.
..... But so do most of your customers (trust me, I'm more computer savvy than most of them).

Even when acrobat doesn't freeze your computer, it is a slow loading program that will probably force your customer to wait for 10 or 15 seconds. 10 or 15 seconds is an intrusive kidney punch for online sales - especially if the bounce rate for that page indicates that the average stay on the PDF is 5 seconds.
....... Not all of us have Alienware's or Mac's.

All you have to do to avoid this problem is use the generally accepted abbreviation for PDF pages (i.e. how google discloses PDF pages). Put PDF at the beginning, like this:

[PDF] Comparison between the Erdnase Grip and the Mechanics Grip



The next most annoying Link faux pas stems from people paranoid about SPAM. So they hide their address from the spiders and use hyperlinks like:Contact me for a quote or

Tell us your opinion.

Their are two drawbacks to configuring your email address this way. First off, is that you will obtain fewer emails. This is because some customers don't have outlook setup correctly; or otherwise are just more accustomed to cutting and pasting email addresses manually.

The theory driving this design recommendation is that you want to make emailing you as easy, and as comfortable, as possible. This means they should have the option of 1)clicking on the link or 2) manually typing in the email on AOL or 3) cutting and pasting your crawlable email address: eg. [e-mail]

Second problem email hyperlinks produce stems from fact that allot of people never setup the email programs, such as outlook, that are opened automatically when clicking on email links. Some people have outlook set to open automatically (as a default setting), but have no idea what the program even does; much less, how to prevent it from loading.

Take my parents computer for instance: the other day I was doing some research online, clicked on an email hyperlink thinking it was a regular link, and BLAMM!
AOL opens up out of no where, giving me a 15 second wait, and than tries to log on (necessitating me having to waste my time closing the program, etc.)

[Carine Bruyndoncx]

I fully agree, I always look at the statusbar to see what is behind the link.
I'm just waiting for the outlook plugin to add an VIRUS MAGNET icon next to the url with the ip address spelled out :) , now that makes you wonder why they don't try to hide it better ...