Sometimes fear is a positive force and can protect and motivate you. When designing websites, I’ve seen fear negatively affect content decisions, and ultimately customers. Recently, I had a client in a competitive market request all right-clicks be disabled from their site. Apparently competitors liked to steal their designs. I tried to explain that disabling right-click has more of a negative effect than a positive one, and that anyone really wanting your pictures will get them whether right-click is enabled or not. For a good article on that, go here.

I’ve seen greater degrees of fear causing iffy decisions to be made, that ultimately resulted in customer frustration. Catalogs with information removed, contact information removed from a web-site – you get the idea. It’s key to keep what’s important at the forefront when designing a website so that fears about how a small percentage of your users might use your content does not negatively affect what the vast majority of your visitors want to accomplish. They want your content, information, your message and they want it immediately available to them. Information needs to be easy to find, and it needs to be made available in a variety of ways, so that your of users can navigate, search and gather information in whatever ways they are used to.

Don’t let fear negatively affect the vast majority of your visitors when it comes to content decisions. Look for solutions that will keep your visitors happy, but hopefully also address whatever possible concerns you have over misuse of your content.

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