Your website is often your best opportunity to attract people to your product or service. You cannot afford to waste that opportunity.
It’s not enough to just cobble together a website because you know you need to have a web presence. If you want to be competitive your website needs to be of high quality.
The aim of your website is generally to gather leads or sales, or to provide visitors with information so they can see the value of your product or service when compared to that of your competitors. You need to make sure that people engage with you and do not leave your website to try elsewhere. Let’s take a look at some areas of website design which are sure to drive customers away if they are not done effectively.
Lack of mobile optimisation
If you have a web presence, you need to make sure it’s optimized for mobile; simple as that. Huge numbers of people now browse the Internet using a mobile device. You cannot afford to miss out on this potential audience. It’s time to put mobile first when thinking about the design of your website and then make adjustments for desktop use; instead of the other way around.
Lack of informative content
Long gone are the days when it was good enough to just draw people in by using the right keywords. You need to provide visitors to your site with high quality information that is useful to them. This not only encourages people to engage with your brand, it also makes it more likely for them to make return visits to your site. If you do not provide useful and well-written content, people are likely to look elsewhere.
Overcrowding of web pages
It’s pointless spending a considerable amount of time creating great content if there is so much of it that it’s uncomfortable to read. The pages of your website should be clean and the content should be succinct. If you want to provide chapter and verse on your products then you should consider hosting magazines and brochures on your website that visitors can read if they wish.
Slow load times
No matter what you have to say to people; if your web pages are slow to load potential visitors will lose interest before they even read anything. This is especially the case when people access your content while on the move. Anyone using a mobile device to access a website tends to abandon the attempt after around three seconds. Also, Google penalizes your slow-loading pages when compiling search engine results – optimizing page speed is one of the rare things you have direct control over to improve your rankings.
Badly thought out navigation
You may have someone hooked with the content of your homepage. Then they try and navigate their way around the rest of your website, and it all goes downhill very quickly. If you do not want to chase people away from your website you need to make navigation simple. Use well thought out menus and headings and make sure that internal links are well placed.
It may seem daunting to try and get it right when it comes to website design; but you really need to make it work. If you are struggling to get there yourself, you can speak to professionals such as Quikclicks. They can help make sure that your website is designed to attract and engage, and not to drive people away.
