Julian Smout, our Managing Director here at Shropshire's Verve Graphic Design & Marketing, has highlighted the 5 most common mistakes made when producing a website. Businesses can spend a great deal of time, money and effort on creating their business website, however, a website that isn’t bringing in the right customers, or any customers at all - isn’t worth having! At Verve we constantly come across websites that are not working effectively, and not selling the products or services that they are intended to sell. These sites are not just do-it-yourself sites but large expensively produced sites. There are 5 key mistakes:
1: Text heavy and poorly thought out content. Think of your website as a shop front. Would you have an essay on your shop front? Would you expect people to read all of that essay? All main pages of your site should have small paragraphs - digestible blocks of text - utilising headings, sub headings, bullets and pull quotes. Visitors to sites will skim and scan - if you want or need to have a lot of information then keep that deep in the site for visitors to find should they require it. Remember - there is a reason us designers like white space. We like to ensure that the message comes across and is not overlooked. Text heavy content is just not readable and therefore is a major mistake. Too many companies flood their sites with content - pages and pages - scroll after scroll. Be descriptive yet concise.
2: Poor Design. There is a lot to designing a website. We would say that I know - but there are a lot of very important considerations. Content needs to stand out and imagery, font selection and poor contrast can make a massive impact on the visitor. Obviously a professionally designed site is going to portray your company a lot better than a self made one (in most cases). But even then - mistakes are made. Too often text is unreadable and there are no size differences. Making some things appear larger than others is much more appealing to the eye and will attract the eye. Contrast variants is key as well as it is the use of contrast that will guide the eye to where you want it to be lead. Use of colours will facilitate this process too. We are constantly coming across sites that are just bland, un-appealing and simply boring. Good design will correct this and is another key factor that should not be ignored and too often is. Spend a bit of time getting the design right. It will be worth it.
3: Technically flawed Navigation It is essential to have quality content that looks good, but poorly structured and technically flawed navigation can be equally as damaging for a website. To avoid this mistake, always plan ahead as to what navigational structure will suit the business' needs best and ensure this is carried on throughout. A good navigation structure should be seamless and will keep visitors on your site for longer, which means potentially more readers, more subscribers, more sales and leads - whichever is your primary objective. Good use of stand alone buttons/links are useful tools for easy navigation. Don't make visitors think about how to navigate your site; it should be effortless and natural.
4: Where is the site? This common mistake is hard to come across as it is difficult to find the site in the first place! Too often businesses spend time and money on a producing a site and then do not pursue any methods to market it. A method such as using google adwords, organic search engine optimisation, online advertising, social media, referral sites etc, need to be employed otherwise no-one will find your site. A starting place which is too often ignored is organic search engine optimisation. When producing a site research the keywords that you think people will use to find your site, then use them in the copy and get your website designer to add them to the "meta" tags - nominal descriptions and page titles. Then make sure your site is submitted to all the main search engines and ensure those search engines can easily navigate your site by producing a site map. Too often websites are not set up in this way. It is just a matter of investing some time - and this time will bring traffic to your site. This in itself arguably makes poor onsite marketing the most important and worst mistake to make.
5: Call-to-action - where's that? Finally, the website is put together, looks great, can be found but all that is useless if your primary call-to-action is a plain "click here" link buried in a sea of text. Call-to-action buttons are a great way to grab the users attention and then importantly capture said users information or sale. Too many websites have no clear strategy when it comes to call-to-actions - and the user is expected to find pages, contact info etc. Decent call-to-actions should mean that the user is attracted by that call-to-action and will follow the link and then enter their information or make a call. Visitors should not have to work or think about what to do - or they will leave the site. Your content should have answered, "What's in it for me? and your call-to-action should now answer, "What do I do now?"
These 5 mistakes are by no means the only mistakes made when producing a website. I could list hundreds but in the interest of keeping this article succinct I chose 5.
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