Are people visiting your web site but not buying? This may be a
sign and the time to do some redesign of your web site. Often you
are so close to what you have created, that you can’t see obvious
design mistakes. I often do the same when writing an article –
everything looks fine when I have finished, yet when I review it
the next day and I’m amazed at how many mistakes I have made.
1. Sloppy Web Site Copy –
your heading and first paragraph should clearly indicate the purpose
of your web site. “Content is King” on the Net, so make
sure there is plenty of focused information for your visitors.
The content should draw the visitor through the site to take action
in the end. Include contact information on every page in case
people have questions.
2. Bad Color Coordination
– avoid using dark text on a dark background. Use dark text
on a light background, such as black on white. Use colors that
blend well together – observe nature or look at paintings
to get some idea of good color combinations.
3. Pages Load Too Slowly
– using too many images or inserting large images on a web
page, slow down the loading time of your web page. Optimize your
images (reduce their size) before you insert them on your site,
otherwise your visitors will leave before your site is loaded.
4. Poor Navigation –
this means visitors can’t easily find the information. They
experience broken links, error pages or discover too many moving
objects (animations, flash, scrolling text, marquees) – all
these will annoy the visitor and cause him to click elsewhere.
Keep your navigation simple by creating clear links on all web
pages.
5. Orphan Pages – these
are pages other than your homepage, where the visitor has no idea
how it fits in with the overall structure of your web site. You
should always have a link to the homepage, so visitors know where
they are on your web site.
6. Long Scrolling –
the visitor has to scroll horizontally, or many pages vertically
to view the whole web page. Create the width of your web page
to fit on one screen, to avoid horizontal scrolling and have a
maximum of 3 pages to be scrolled vertically.
7. Meta Tags Missing –
without optimizing your web page with a description or keywords,
people can’t find you on the search engines. Research key
words or phrases relevant to your site content. Include them in
your title, description and Web Site copy.
8. Lack of Marketing Strategy
– a beautiful lawn without sun or water will soon die. A
Web Site without visitors will soon die also. They are the life
blood for your website. Create numerous marketing strategies to
attract visitors to your web site – you never know which
one will be the most effective.
9. Poor Layout and Design
– create an aesthetically pleasing design to keep the visitors
on your site. Create enough white space between your text and
images by using margins. Don’t overlap text and images and
avoid capitalizing all text – it gives the impression you
are shouting at your visitors. Use font type such as Arial or
Verdana to make it easier to read on your computer screen.
10. Avoid Using Frames –
frames don’t allow you to bookmark the page or return to
it and sometimes the URLS stop working.
11. No Cross Browser Compatibility
– you may be losing many customers if your Web Site is not
compatible to the browsers most people are using. Internet Explorer
(IE 4, 5, 6) is currently the dominant browser, and most users
are displaying 800x600 pixels or more, with a color depth of at
least 65K colors. (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).
Therefore check your design with these statistics in mind.
12. Outdated Information
– your web site is like a garden. If you allow weeds to block
out the sun and take over your garden, it will be destroyed. Attracting
and keeping web site visitors, means continually adding new information
(i.e. latest news), deleting irrelevant, outdated information
and removing broken links.
Continuous maintenance of your web site is crucial to attracting
and retaining visitors. If you don’t have time to do it yourself,
hire a Web Gardener (Web Designer), to keep your site looking fresh,
clean and fast loading.
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