Are you not getting the traffic you want? Or are people coming to your site but bouncing off in about 3 seconds? Even if you SEO’d the heck out of your site, it still might not work to produce the results you want. Well, here are some simple things you can do to turn down the suck on your website.
Text Colors That Hurt the Eyes
Here’s one to get out of the way quickly – white text on a black background. Ouch! While it may be okay at first, if you read that text for about 15 minutes, it’ll be burned into your retinas. Make it easy on your website viewers and use a dark-colored text on a white or light-colored background.
Labyrinth-Like Navigation
When a website is hard to navigate, people click away. Make sure that it’s clear what links on your site lead where. Make use of drop down menus and breadcrumb trails (for example: Home > Website Design > The Suck Factor > Navigation). It helps if there are several ways to navigate, like a bar along the top and a menu on the side. And keep it all consistent by putting the same menus on every page.
De-Clutter
Your site shouldn’t look like a garage that hasn’t been cleaned out in 13 years. A too-cluttered website creates a frustrating user experience. Your visitors’ brains will short-circuit. Make the site simple and keep each page focused on just one thing. Make sure there are some empty spaces.
Don’t Be Mysterious
Sucky websites aren’t clear about what the site is. Have you ever hit a website, spent about 5 seconds going ‘huh?’, and then clicked away? That’s what your users will be doing if it’s not clear. Visitors to your site should know exactly what kind of business you are, where you operate and what you can do for them. They should be able to sum this up in a couple of seconds.
A Website Is Not a Brochure
Your website shouldn’t be static like a brochure or calling card. The Web offers all kinds of interactive opportunities, so you should take advantage of them. Give visitors something to DO on the site and it’ll keep them engaged. Some ideas include forums, multimedia, games, blogs they can comment on, social media integration (so they can ‘like’ it) and chat features.
This Is Internet Clash
You might want to spend some time looking at other sites in your niche to get ideas. Sometimes people are turned off by sites that don’t ‘look’ like what they’re supposed to. For example, a law firm website with a cartoon panda welcoming them; or a roofing contractor site that has a flower and rainbow background; or a breast cancer awareness site that uses fluorescent orange as its color scheme. If the site design clashes with what you’re offering, people may get confused.
If your site sucks, you may need a complete overhaul. Or you might just need to change a few simple design features to make it more user-friendly. Whatever you do, keep in mind that the goal of your web design is to create a wonderful user experience.
David Carleton is a San Diego Local Business Marketing Consultant who specializes in showing small business owners how to spend less and get more from their marketing and advertising using low cost strategies in local business marketing, lead generation and conversion, Internet marketing and social media. To download a copy of the free report, “7 Steps to Website Success”, go to http://LocalBusinessMarketingSuccess.com
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