7 Website Mistakes to Avoid
A website that is not well put together, can have a negative impact on your business, so you’ll want to ensure that your site is properly constructed. 75% of consumers state that they judge a business’s credibility by how well put together its website is. In reality, you only have 20 seconds to win the attention of the visitor, so you’ll want to ensure that you’re putting your best foot forward.
Below are 7 Website mistakes that you’ll want to avoid, if you want your website to outperform all the rest.
1. Outdated Business Information
If you never update the business information on your website, this could adversely affect your business in many different ways, one being the potential visitors that you will lose. Having a website that doesn’t have any contact information at all, can hurt its rankings in the search engines. You want to ensure that the contact information on your website, and the domains whois information match.
When a customer visits your website and looks at its contact information, they expect everything to match up, so they don’t want to suffer the inconvenience of an email address not working, or a phone number no longer in services, all of these things leaves the customer frustrated. You want to avoid such mistakes, to ensure that you win over as many people as possible.
2. Using “Under Construction” Signs On Your Website
Your website should function like a living document. As a result, they should evolve and grow. Thus, when you use an “under construction” sign, it sends out the wrong message to your visitors. If your site isn’t ready for the pubic, then it shouldn’t be available for public view.
3. Not Using a Different Colour for Visited Links
If you’re able to keep track of where you’ve been, then you’ll be able to better understand where you are. Additionally, knowing where you’ve been, makes it easier for you to determine where to go next. Links are an important factor in all of this. Users will typically avoid those links which they found didn’t help them very much. On the flipside, they can revisit those links that did prove helpful in the past.
The most important part of it is, when you know which pages you have already visited, as it prevents you from unintentionally revisiting the same pages.
Such benefits only occur under one circumstance, and that is when the visitor is able to tell the different between visited and unvisited links, because of their different colours. When visited links remain the same colour as unvisited links, visitors will become navigationally disorientated, which will lead to them going back to the same pages over and over again.
4. Using Too Much Text
If you use large blocks of text, then it can put your readers off. The vast majority of visitors want their information fast, and they don’t want to have to search through large blocks of text. That’s not to say that your articles shouldn’t have depth to them, but you should break up your text into much smaller, readable paragraphs, using images and headlines where applicable.
There are many websites and applications that you can use to aid you in your website copy. HemingwayApp is one tool that you may want to use, as it will help you construct more readable sentences, advising you, if a sentence is too long or two complicated, while providing you with suggestions on how to make it more presentable.
5. No Copyright Statements
Everything written on your website by you, is copyright-able. So you’ll want to ensure that you include copyright statements on your website, and update these statements where appropriate. Nothing makes your website look more outdared, than a copyright statement that hasn’t been updated since 2001.
6. Slow Website
Around 48% of internet surfers expect a website to load within 2 seconds and will leave a website if it takes any longer. Patience is one thing that most internet surfers do not have, so you want to ensure that your site is running as fast as it possibly can. There are many things you can do, to accomplish this, such as resize images, use a Content Delivery Network, remove plugins that are no longer necessary and use browser caching.
There are many articles that you can check out that will give you an in-depth look into how to make your website faster, so I recommend you check those out. A slow website, without a doubt, will lose a considerable amount of visitors, and will adversely effect your search engine rankings, so it’s something you definitely want to avoid.
7. Long Articles
Studies have shown that most visitors will not spend a considerable amount of time on a website reading a large article. They’ll either, print it out, or scan through it, to find the major talking points. It’s for this reason why you do not want to make your articles too long. If you have a lot to say on a particular topic, then I recommend you break your information up into a kind of series. That way people will be able to read the information in parts and pick and choose, using your navigation, which parts of the series is of interest to them. Additionally, because visitors do like to print out web pages, it’d be a good idea if you included your contact information on each page.
Author Bio
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website where he writes extensively on computer related issues.