Vancouver business coach Mark Wardell features an article titled 10 tips for growing your business on his website. One of the points, keep your business spotless, rings true for websites.
He sates: “Unless you own a farm, dirt and clutter give an unprofessional impression whereas a clean business sends a message of professionalism to everyone, including your staff.”
The same goes for websites. Is yours cluttered? Here’s a checklist.
A noisy business website distracts visitors, which negatively impacts the bottom line.
Websites often become convoluted over time because businesses don’t invest the time and resources to remove obsolete information.
Many businesses just add content on an as needed basis. But, just as important, businesses should regularly maintain websites. Scheduled clean-ups promote positive online experiences, which translate to increased conversions.
Things to watch out for:
For a typical business, websites can be maintained by investing one hour, just once a month. During a website audit, I recall an employee who detested the idea of cleaning up a few web pages. But the handful of hours it took him to make those changes are saving thousands of prospects and customers several seconds each visit, which makes it more than worthwhile.
Clean your website to make it easier to do business with you. It makes perfect business sense.
To help your visitors enjoy a positive online experience, it’s important to prioritize the information in your web content.
An effective strategy is to separate the “need to know” from the “nice to know.”
Group your need to know information — anything that is critical to your messaging. And place this relevant information on the top pages of your website.
Then take the nice to know information and place it on secondary pages. Links should be clearly labeled and point to this supporting information.
This nice to know/ need to know strategy complements the inverted pyramid organization, which is the best way to present information on your website.
By neatly providing visitors the relevant material first and support material second, you provide an intuitive information flow. That leads to satisfied visitors and completed tasks.
“We've been extremely pleased with Webcopyplus. They did exactly what they said they would do on time and on budget — a rare experience in this day and age. Not only has their work had a positive measurable impact on our search engine rankings, but we've noticed that visitors to our site now stay longer and visit more pages than ever before.”
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