5 Common Mistakes That Diminish Your Website’s Effectiveness

#1 – Not saying what you’re all about                      

The first thing that anyone sees when visiting your website is of critical value.  You have to sell your site in the first 7 seconds, without ‘selling’ your site.  By that I mean, make sure the purpose of your site is evident, and apparent.  This can be in your headline, the title, or by its structure.  

Your visitors should not have to read several paragraphs to find out what your website is all about.  It should be easy, almost intuitive.  The harder it is the more likely your visitor will decide they don’t care, and then leave.

The main question that every visitor has when arriving at your site is “Am I in the right place to find what I’m looking for.”   How quickly, and how well you answer that question goes a long way to keeping your visitor on your site for any length of time.

There are three simple things you can do to help your visitor answer that question.
* Position: Your most important visitor keeping information should be high on the page
* Size: Your most important material should be bigger and more visible than your less important material.
* Contrast:  Use more color and size contrast to highlight what you need to communicate first.

Don’t be afraid to come right out and tell your visitor what your website is all about.  That’s far better than having them figure it out themselves.  Which if they have to spend more than a couple seconds to do so, just prompts them to leave for another site.

This is simple to do.
* Let them know what your company is.
* What are your products and/or services.
* For whom these products are intended for.

This will go a long way to helping them answers the “Am I in the right place to find what I’m looking for” question.

So the web site's first job is to answer that question, whether positively or negatively.

#2 – To much dead space

This is the surest way of telling your visitors they’re in the wrong place.  This dead space is often labeled “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon”.  If you start seeing these in a website, then you can’t help but to conclude that the site is not complete, and that you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.

If you have these on your website you are blatantly telling your visitor that they won’t find what they are looking for.  And that you can’t be bothered with completing your website.  No matter how important it may be.

There is also another kind of dead space – near empty features.  If you have a tab for ‘Locations’ you’d better have more than one location.  If you have a tab for news, you’d better have more than one press release.  

Don’t mislead your visitors to a near empty page where they don’t know if this is all there is, or if the page is incomplete.  This will really tell them that they won’t find what they’re looking for.

#3 - Too much bling

Don’t try to over sell you site with a load of fancy graphics.  Unless you’re a graphic designer, that’s not you product.  Concentrate on your product.  That’s what your visitor is trying to do.  Don’t distract him/her with irrelevant graphics.

Use graphics that are appropriate to your product and/or industry.  No matter how much bling you try to add to your website, its still about the product and/or services your offer.  And your potential customers know this even if you don’t.  

If your website isn’t about your product, why should any visitor linger and try to weave through all the glam graphics just to find out what you are offering.  They will simply go somewhere else.

Also, while we talking about appearances, try to keep your website congruent with your business.  Don’t try to give the impression that your company is something it isn’t.  Choose your website pictures carefully, so they won’t appear misleading.  

#4 - Not collecting information

If you’re not collecting information with your website, then you’re falling very short of the mark of having an effective website.

Your website is not just for disseminating information, it also needs to collect information.  You need to use your website to build a list.  You want names and email addresses.  This information will enable you to contact your visitors directly, repeatedly, and individually.  

You’ve no doubt spent some real effort in building your website with quality content.  But your visitors may only stay on your website for a minute or so.  Wouldn’t be nice to extend that time a bit.   If you can contact them proactively, then you can get them to visit your site more often.  And you get to spend more time with them.

This is where building a relationship with them comes into play.  One of your main goals for your website should be to turn mere visitors into potential customers, and then into customers.  If you’re not building a list, then you are limiting this process to what can happen in just a couple of minutes when they first visit your site.   Wouldn’t it be better to have the option to do this over a period of weeks and months?  If you have names and email addresses you can build a relationship with your visitors.

You can provide more valuable content for free.  You can inform them of specials, and additional areas of your business.  Anything that you want them to know about your business you can make sure they know.  Repeated, regular contact.  Right to their inbox.   This is how to transform your visitors into customers.

So how do you get them to give up their names and email addresses.  With an ethical bribe of course.   Use an ebook, a series of articles, subscription to a newsletter, or even coupons for future products or services.  It must be valuable, it must be closely related to your websites content, and there must be some ‘wow’ factor involved, as in “wow, if he/she is giving this away the real product must be really great”  

#5 - Stale content

Why would any one visit a website more than once, if they are sure nothing has changed.  

How often do you update your website.  If the objective of your website is to just attract one time visitors, then you don’t have to worry about updating your content.  But if you’re trying to build a relationship with your website visitors, then you need some fresh content on a regular basis.  

Who wants to have a conversation with someone who says the same thing every time you speak to them?  That would get pretty pointless quick.  If you want repeat visitors, then give them  reasons to come back.   

This goes hand in hand with collecting names and emails on your website.  When you have new content, you can let people know about it.  You can suggest they stop by your site, instead of just hoping that they will remember your site well enough to return to it.

Besides just fresh content, think about fresh media.  You can add audio files, video files, and powerpoint presentations to your site.  Swap in some new photos, add some guest authors.  Anything that will make your website appear different from the last time it was visited will help make your site appear fresh and dynamic.  

So there your have it.  If your website doesn’t fall into one or more of these traps, then you’re well on your way to maximizing your website’s effectiveness.