The president of GetRelevant, a San Francisco-based online marketing company, also spends a lot of his time thinking about how to make customers happy. So when Roberts visits a Web site and clicks his browser's back button again and again but goes nowhere, he gets frustrated fast. When I have to stop what I'm doing and figure out a way out of a site, it's really annoying. As online businesses resort to increasingly manipulative tactics to win over customers, the controversial practice of using coding to disable a browser's back button has popped up at mainstream Web sites. Your back button won't get you out of this Web site if you're using a Netscape browser.
Studies show the most popular link on any Web site is a user's back button.
It also placed small padlock icons next to the offenders in its directory of Web sites. At a time when e-commerce sites know their very survival depends on the quality of the customer experience they deliver, industry consultants are at a loss to explain why so many would risk turning off customers by disabling their back buttons. If a customer is not able to use features in his or her browser on your site then it deteriorates the experience and by association deteriorates the value and the brand of the Web site. As a Web site, you want to get return visits by establishing a relationship and providing a good browsing experience. Most back buttons are disabled by the use of redirect pages.