Arguably the most crucial element of a business’ image is its website. In this day and age, potential customers and clients are most likely to visit a business’s website instead of phoning or visiting in person before engaging in their services. However, having a website is no guarantee that the customer or client will engage in that business’ services. Rather, this first point of contact may in fact put customers and clients off and force them to look elsewhere on the internet. When it comes to your website itself, there are three areas which are crucial to look at. Those areas are design, usability and SEO. This article will look at design faults that websites commonly experience and how they can be dealt with to ensure the visitors stay on your site longer and ultimately engage with your business.
Because users are visiting you in person or giving you a phone call, they want to know whether or not your business is what they’re looking for, and they want to know it fast. If the visitor can’t figure out exactly what your business is about within the first few seconds of visiting your website, they’ll most likely close that tab and try the next result that Google gives them. This is why it’s important to make the information on your website’s homepage as succinct as possible.
On the subject of homepages, there is something else that will make up to 25% of visitors leave immediately. This is a welcome page, also known as a ‘splash’ page. For those unfamiliar, this is a page which is blank except for a welcome message and a click through button or two that lets you into the homepage (this also has SEO implications which will be discusses in a later article). As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, visitors want to know what your business is immediately. A splash page is only a hindrance to this.
Though it may show off your web design prowess and make your website look fancy, having moving visuals will most likely distract your visitors from the real content of your site. These include any animations, auto-play videos, background music or scrolling and/or flashing text. However, if there is a clear way to stop the video or sound playing, this is fine because your visitors have the option of listening/watching or not. Embedding videos from YouTube or Vimeo is popular among web designers because visitors can easily start or stop the videos if they want to. Forcing them to watch videos without being able to continue what they are wanting to do on the site will more than likely make them exit your site.
Pop-up windows are another thing to stay well clear of. As an indication of what the internet thinks of these, a Google search for “pop-up window” reveals that a lot of the entries are devoted to telling people how to block them. Pop-ups do have their uses but providing visitors with information (this is called interruption marketing) while they’re on your website is not one of them.
Does your website work for your business?
Your website should be number one at sales and marketing your business. If not, you need one that is.
Do your website’s navigation buttons have permanent text labels on them? It may not seem like a big deal, but not labelling navigation buttons is highly detrimental and can put visitors off. This is a term called ‘mystery meat navigation’. What this means is that visitors won’t know what a button does until they hover their mouse over it. If they have to hover their mouse over every single navigation button to find what they’re looking for, they will likely get frustrated and leave your website. Even if each navigation button has a different symbol on it, this is no substitute for text labels.
While we’re on the topic of navigation, does your website scroll down or sideways? There’s a reason why the scroll wheel on your mouse is up and down, not side to side (well, most mice at least). Just like reading a piece of paper, up and down reading is far easier on the eye. Even if the website itself is designed to be read top to bottom, it is still important to make sure that all of the pages fit on a computer monitor or mobile/tablet device. You don’t want to have any pieces of information that are slightly too far right to be placed on the screen.
So, your website’s homepage is easily accessible, succinctly describes what your company is about, is devoid of pop-ups and non-mutable music and each navigation button is appropriately labelled. But, what sort of colours are you using? Use of different colours can make a website look more engaging, but this can often be a detriment. The reason why most text, both in print and on computer screens, is black text on a white background is because this is the easiest combination for the human eye to read. This is to do with colour contrast. High contrast colours (such as the previous example) are easier to read than low contrast. One huge advantage that webpages have over printed pages in that there is no extra cost involved in using colours. This doesn’t mean that you have to go overboard with them. Using too many colours with no clear meaning or reason on your website can not only distract viewers from what you’re trying to tell them, but it can also make your business look unprofessional.
This is only a short introduction to reasons why your website’s design could be turning potential customers and/or clients away. Of course, your website’s design could be totally fine. However, that doesn’t mean that the website itself can’t improve in other ways. In the next post, I will go through the ways that your website’s usability could be putting visitors off and how you can fix this.
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