subject: 8 Website Mistakes You Must Avoid [print this page] 8 Website Mistakes You Must Avoid 8 Website Mistakes You Must Avoid
Every business needs a website today no matter how large or small and no matter what your business is - you need to be on line.
If you are not on the web you not only miss out on potential customers, you miss out on building business partners and generating new business opportunities.
However, if you have a website you need to make sure that it works for you and you need to avoid the eight basic mistakes that will turn a visitor away.
1 No (obvious) Contact Details
You will be amazed at the number of sites that I am asked to look at where the owner either has not included contact details or where they are hidden so deep within the site that no-one would ever find them.
If visitors cannot find your contact details within 9 seconds they will leave.
Make sure that your contact details are clear and easy to find.
Include both e mail and telephone contacts where possible and if you can, include a landline number. Potential customers are often put off by mobile contact numbers.
2 Selling To The World
If you try to appeal to everyone you risk selling to no one. Your website will work if it clearly understands its target market and aims directly at it.
Unless you have the size and clout of E Bay or Amazon you cannot possibly hope to sell to the world. .
Know your market and sell specifically to them.
3 Call To Action
This is one of the most important elements to any site, and yet almost 50% of the sites that I am asked to look at either have no call to action, or no obvious call to action.
The call to action is the hook that you need to get people to do what you want them to do.
Call, e mail, buy, subscribe.
This has to be clear. It has to be well positioned, and if you can, vary it a little.
4 Widgets and Graphics
Whilst web designers are often keen to differentiate themselves by peppering your site with fancy graphics and widgets the reality is very much that keeping it simple works.
When you get a visitor to your site you will have between 5 and 9 seconds to engage them. Yes. 5 9 seconds, that's it!
Large graphic files will take up bandwidth, so if your visitor does not have a super fast connection it will cause the site to load very slowly and your visitor is likely to move on.
Optimise the images to be as small as possible. If you don't need it don't put it in there.
5 Music/Sound that can't be turned off
Similar to the previous point. Music / sound works with a very specific target market but it is a very small percentage of the population.
For most of us, it is annoying.
If you think your site needs music and sound offer a simple and easy to find button which allows people to turn it off.
Web designers can make great websites.. but very few of them know (or care) about what actually wins customers, so make sure that you get the site that you (and your visitors) want.
6 Download Here
In some businesses this is unavoidable (estate agents, letting agents, or technical spec providers) however on the whole people hate having to download PDF's or documents. If the content is worth having include it on the site.
If it's not why offer it as a PDF?
7 Adverts
You have built a site to show off your product or service offering. When visitors arrive at your site they have come to see what you have to offer.
As well as looking a little tacky, adverts and pop-ups detract from your own message and that's why you built your site in the first place. You will not have your visitors' attention for long so why try to distract them from your message on the premise that you might make a few pence from an advert.
'Hover-Ads' can be very detrimental to your conversion rate do not use them.
8 Visitor counters
Visitors and page counters now look incredibly dated. They are generally used by inexperienced designers and really serve very little purpose at all in fact they serve no purpose at all.
If you have a small business, you are not likely to be generating thousands of visitors each day, so why emphasise the fact.
Whether you run a caf or a consultancy firm your website can be an exceptionally powerful tool but you have to use it correctly. Be clear on your objectives and how you aim to achieve them, and nine times out of ten simple is best.
