How much time your visitors spend on your site has an enormous effect on them doing business with you. Here are 10 surefire ways to make them go running to your competition.

Long animation intros
Most of your website visitors won't have the time, patience or interest in sitting through a lengthy animated intro, or even a short one for that matter. The vast majority of visitors are coming to your site for information or to complete a task, such as ordering your products, not to be subjected to your dated web designer's animation abilities. Ex-ing the flash intros will prevent your visitors from ex-ing out your website window and moving on.

Bad Navigation
The best way to have visitors leave your website quickly is to frustrate them with clumsy menus and bad navigation. Website content needs to be accessible, so navigation should be user friendly and intuitive to the point that it anticipates your visitor's needs. Remember, most visitors want information and if they can't access the information they came for, they'll attempt to find it elsewhere.

Pop-Ups
Everybody hates spam, and pop-ups are usually spam. For this reason, many people disable them from appearing in their browsers, so it's important that your website content doesn't open in a new window. Even if it isn't spam, they may never see it. Did I mention everybody hates spam?

Disabled back buttons
People like to be able to utilize their own browser tools, so disabling them in any form is a bad idea. If they need to access the back button, it's probably because your website content is either incomplete, inadequate, or badly organized. Disabling them is just another way to frustrate them. Furthermore, disabling browser features can adversely affect your placement on search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Hidden Contact Information
Sometimes, visitors come to your website just to get your address or phone number. This is a good thing! Making them search around your website for this info is not. Make it as easy as possible and put your contact information on every page, in plain sight!

Inadequate or Outdated Content
Again, most website visitors seek information in the form of copy content. If your website provides it, they are much more likely to spend significant amounts of time on your website and return often, greatly increasing the odds of them contacting you, which in turn increases the likelihood of them doing business with you.

Jumping Through Hoops
Websites that require people to enter information or register as a guest to access all or portions of their content are asking for too much. If a customer can't get what they need from your website they'll move on to one that will. The same holds true for websites that require visitors to download additional software to view the website.

Slow Websites
Websites that that are not optimized for speed, have heavy files, or are hosted on a slow server are very frustrating. Again, many website visitors don't have the time or patience for a slow loading website. They'll move on to your competitor's website faster than you can say “loading”.

Dead Links
Nothing says “I don't give a crap about the experience of my website visitor” better than dead links. People really like it when things work properly, and get a bit miffed when they don't. This is especially true, when your link promises them the very information that they need, only to do nothing or to open a “does not exist” error page.

Repetition and reloading Content
Featuring a song or video on the main page of your website may seem like a good idea. It's not. As the main index page often contains kinetic links that are accessible from that page only, vistors may visit that page often. And every time they do, the into song or video reloads. This can be annoying at best. Just ask Sisyphus.