Many website owners are, to put it bluntly, login-happy. They love the concept of requiring user registration for everything from showing the price of merchandise to reading posts on customer forums.

From the perspective of the site owner, registration sounds like a hassle-free way to ensure that you get something out of your pageviews, either by tracking logged-in accesses or by simply collecting a profile for each user.

However, in doing so, you’re often cutting off your nose to spite your face. The web is no longer novel, and customers have had time to decide what they do and don’t like. Registration has clearly made its way to the second column.

Minimal Exposure

Many consumers tend to operate, especially online, with a mindset of minimal exposure. They’ve been conditioned from years of phishing scams, spammers, and shady businesses that you don’t hand out information to strangers that is not absolutely necessary.

Many registration systems tend to violate that principle. While a suitable minimum of information for a registered user would be a login name and password, frequently, users are expected to supply an email address (and, if they’re lucky, a choice as to wether or not they want a barrage of email), physical address, or demographic information. The more you have to give away in terms of privacy for the information on the site, the less valuable it seems.

In addition, there’s a subtle fear in creating an account that it’s just another login and password to be forgotten when you want to change a setting or make a purchase.

Allow Six to Eight Weeks for Delivery

The Internet’s most compelling feature is its spontainety. A user can find what he wants in Wikipedia faster than he can find the right volume of his old paper Britannica. Registration tends to shatter that premise. Even if the form is only a couple of fields, many registration systems now will require you to wait, frequently ten minutes or more, for an activation link email to prove you gave them a live address, before you can begin using the content. In the ten minutes it took for the message to arrive, I could well have found the information I wanted elsewhere, and odds are I won’t even bother activating the account.

You don’t have a monopoly

Even if you are the only site hosting a specific article, you are almost certainly not the only source for information on the topic. Some users will gladly try several no-registration-required sites to avoid having to use a registration one, especially if it involves the hassle of a new account setup.

Signal to Noise

Somehow, some registration sites do manage to bypass these problems. Success brings its own problems, especially for the marketing department. Given a 10,000 user registration database, instead of a tightly crafted 1,000 user list of marketing contacts, you’ll have to sort out which users are likely to convert to sales. You may end up with hundreds of users who signed up to see one item of interest, such as an article featured on Digg or Slashdot, and dozens of inactive or out-dated registrations. Unless you want to pay for thousands of emails that will be ignored or worse, you’re going to have to filter your registration pool significantly before you treat it as the quality marketing resource you imagined it to be.

Do you really think Googlebot has a login?

People who hide their best content in a registered-members-only area are committing a significant SEO sin. Most search spiders will be incapable of using the submission form to access the registered-user area, even assuming they were allowed access in the first place.

A dangerous new technique has appeared to counter this. Although all the information gets sent, a non-registered user will find his browsing experience hindered, or outright blocked, by client-side scripting. Of course, this will have no effect on the page at the primitive view of the search spider. While this initially seems to be a clever way to let Google in while keeping a nonregistered user out, it runs an extremely high risk of penalty from search engines. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

The search engine is clearly getting different content than the user, once you take into account the blocked displays. It’s no different from packing a site with keywords that are coloured white-on-white-background or hidden in invisible boxes, and will likely earn you the exact same penalties. All it takes is someone to blow the whistle on you.

You Become Just A Small Obstacle

If you annoy users with registrations, you may soon find yourself the victim of their workarounds. Perhaps the best-known example of this is when many newspapers began to require registration to view recent articles. Some users created “pass-around” accounts… one guy registers, and then he posts the login for everyone to use. The marketing value of that registration is nil, unless you really believe that a single person read every article on your site 300 times in the last hour.

If you have a system which allows non-login access for people referred by affiliates, that will be exploited. Some poor slob will suddenly have 300,000 visits to the site through his affiliate link, and no clue why.

And, of course, there is very little stopping people from just mirroring your site’s valuable content and sharing that link. Again, one person registers, and the whole community gets access. While you may be able to pursue such people with copyright laws, you may wish to ask the recording industry how effective that’s been at keeping their content under their control. In addition, the ephemeral nature of many articles means the mirror may go up and down before you even know what’s going on.

Summary

Customers may want what you have to offer, but they resent jumping through hoops that are perceived as unnecessary or excessively nosy to get it.

Given that, when is it acceptable to ask for registration?

If your site displays a significant amount of customized information, and there’s no solid “fallback” option, then it makes sense to create an account. Just adding a “Hello, Joe Smith, you last visited on April 13″ is NOT enough to sell people on this. On the other hand, a local TV schedule that defaults to Ottawa, Ontario will look more than a little strange to a user in Phoenix, Arizona.

If your site provides per-user information, such as order tracking, prices that depend on the user, or shipping information on file, accounts can provide real benefits to their holders. Even in that situation, users will prefer to create their accounts with the minimal information to complete the order and at the latest possible time, going back to their preference for minimal exposure.

Sites with community features like comment and review posting can usually get away with requiring registration for those features, because it’s recognized as a way to keep spam manageable.

However, even if you have to register to add to the site, the use of registration to merely access the site should be minimized. You can’t wall your content off from the rest of the world, and at the same time expect buzz and search engines to hop the wall to make your site more valuable.