Your website homepage is the face of your business, but sometimes it’s about what you don’t do as much as it is what you do. This can ring particularly so on the subject of your website design. There are lots of things that can send visitors screaming into cyberspace to escape these grievous errors. Let‘s find out if any of these sound familiar to you.
- No clear objective – According to research, you have about 4 seconds to show what your website is about before they bail.
- Not making the content scannable – We read in chunks, if you can't scan your page and have the gist of it in a few seconds, you could turn off a substantial portion of your visitors!
- Not being mobile ready – Mobile is no longer an extravagance, as according to Google half of all online traffic is already mobile.
- Not making use of video on your site – Videos rule, but whatever you do, avoid autoplaying music without exception!
- No updated, quality content – If your content articles are from Bush’s first term, it’s no wonder they’re fleeing! Also no fancy fonts or absurdly long pages.
- Hard-to-find contact information – Make sure we can contact you if we want to!
- Not collecting email addresses – Also a necessity. Establishing a list is one of the keys to long-term success online.
- Not utilizing title and description Meta tags on your website – These can help you get indexed and ranked on the internet.
- No social sharing buttons – Social media is a substantial part of search engine optimization now, therefore you want to make your content shareable.
- No or poor Calls-to-Action – You want an action from your visitors; ask for it!
- Poor site navigation – Avoid using drop-down menus, and be sure that all pages on your website include links back to your home page.
- Not optimizing images – You need to use the ALT and TITLE attributes for any images you post.
- Overuse of Flash – Besides being a pain for the GoogleBot to read, it may be very irritating to your visitors.
- No metrics to determine your progress – Do you really not want to know how many people are coming around and from where? What do they like, or not like?
- “Intro” pages – These are only an obstacle to your content. You really want to go there? (I’m looking at you, fancy restaurants.)