Don’t Commit These Seven Website Sins
Do you remember the late 1990s when the first web sites appeared on the internet? You saw a lot of flashing pictures … eyeballs and heads … floating banners … awful color combinations … several fonts in all sizes and colors. Website developers used everything available to them and made a mess of their sites.
Nearly 20 years later, web developers have made their sites more visitor friendly. They have to … so potential customers will stay, read the blogs and product information and click on the “buy” button.
But still, nearly every site I look at has one or more of these serious mistakes or “sins” because businesses don’t put themselves in their visitors shoes.
Let’s take a look at these Seven Website Sins:
1. Going To the Dark Side
Your web site should have a white or light-colored background … not black or dark colors. Light yellow or beige or even light blue is fine. The fonts should be black in Verdana, Arial, Times-Roman … common, easy to read fonts. Don’t get fancy using five different fonts of six different colors. Your visitors won’t like it and will leave.
You say you are an “artist” and a black background makes your artwork look better. Or you are a designer trying to win an award and not trying to sell anything. You may be right but your visitors may not stay long if there is little contrast on your site.
2. Leading Them Down a Crooked Path
Don’t confuse your visitors. Lead them through your site with good navigation. These days the best position for your menu is horizontally at the top of the site where visitors can miss it. Second best is on the left side running vertically down the side. This is a better option if you have a menu that include a large number of pages.
You should also insert links in each page to encourage a visitor to go to another page. Google likes this, too.
Your home page should be designed to get the visitor to click links to other pages. Putting two or three large, buttons for them to click on to a product page or contact page is one of the best things you can do for your website.
If you are a local business with a retail store, make sure visitors can find a map or directions to your location.
3. Not Enough Offers
Always keep in mind the purpose of your site. For a business you want a visitor to find your site and click to buy or click for more information. Strategically place links and buttons on each page … and not all at the bottom.
You may not want a “buy” button on every page but a link should allow the customer to move from an information page to a product order page or service order page.
And if you are a local business be sure to put your phone number in a prominent place … best is at the top in the header of each page where they can’t miss it … when they decide to take you up on your offer.
4. Confusing Your Visitors With Too Many Ads
Too many Google AdSense and floating banner ads can be annoying to visitors … because they can’t focus on reading what your product will do for them. Do you really want ads on the same pages where you’re trying to sell your products? Maybe not.
Save the ads for pages where you describe non-competing products. Or put the ads in a column on the right side of the page.
5. Bragging On The Home Page
How often have you seen this on the home page of a site?:
“Hi, I’m Joe Smith,
Our company has been in business for 30 years and makes the highest quality products you’ve ever seen …
we have won 4 blue star awards for our …”
This is an autobiography about the company. Remember … visitors are only looking for benefits for themselves on your site. If they don’t quickly see a product or service they want … and understand the benefits to them … they’re gone.
Don’t make them do a lot of work. Make sure up front your headlines and copy tell them quickly what your products and services will do for them.
Save the autobiography for a separate, secondary page listed in the menu under About or Bio or Our Company.
Even better … let your customers brag about you by having a couple of testimonials in a box on your home page. And have a separate web page for more testimonials and case studies.
6. Forgetting About Your Customer
You made the sale and made a profit. Great! Did you remember to get the customer’s e-mail address and send a thank you e-mail or postcard? If you didn’t your customer may forget about you … and look elsewhere for her needs next time.
An auto-responder can help automate your e-mails and ensure customers won’t forget you. Aweber and Constant Contact are two of the less expensive auto-responders that are very popular. They are indispensable if you are selling information like e-books or webinars. Or for business to business (B2B) marketing.
7. No Search Engine Optimization
You want to be found by Google, Yahoo and Bing and other search engines, right? Then you must give some thought to keyword usage in your web page title, headlines and content.
In this article, “website sins” appears in the article title, headline, page URL, page content and meta description. The search engines like to see this consistency but don’t like overusing the keyword phrase. And visitors don’t like spammy-looking content that doesn’t make sense.
It’s tricky to make both your human and search engine visitors happy … but it can be done.
Not paying attention to search engine optimization means hundreds or thousands of visitors may never find your site.
Oh, by the way, if you are a local business, do make sure the name of your city is included at least once in the website or local customers will have trouble finding you.
Please contact me and let me know how I can help your business.
(These are the traditional 7 sins: wrath, greed, gluttony, lust, pride, sloth, envy. Most but not all are represented above.)