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:
- Outdated information, events etc.
- Too many menu items or links
- Irrelevant web copy or graphics
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.
Your homepage is one of the key pages on your website. It’s often the starting point for visitors and therefore viewed most often. So what should your homepage communicate?
Your homepage should:
- Introduce the purpose and scope of your website
- Set the tone and build credibility
Important homepage elements:
- Header and footer
- Logo and tagline
- Clear menu and table of contents
- Company overview
- Key benefits you offer
- News, events and announcements
Like other pages, keep the design and messages simple, and use small images so the homepage loads quickly. Also, use direct, simple sentences.
Every slight improvement to your homepage’s web content will help you create a good first — and lasting — impression.
Information layering is a practical technique that helps online visitors quickly gather information relevant to their needs.
In brief, high level information is provided with links to more detail and supplementary web content.
Webcopyplus employs this strategy for clients, and finds it especially useful for IT firms, which generally need to target a wide-ranging audience.
Take, for example, an IT services page that offers an overview of offerings, including Network consulting, Disaster planning and Web hosting. Each noted service would include a link to more specific information.
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Despite major drawbacks of Flash-based sites, some business owners continue to fall into this trap.
As previously noted in Backbone Magazine, Webcopyplus recognizes Flash is an outstanding tool for adding audio, video and animation to a site. However, Flash-based sites can’t be indexed by search engine spiders, which account for the majority of traffic to websites. As a result, these beautiful websites often draw little, if any, traffic.
Moreover, Flash intros prove to be a waste of time and resources. Fortunately, most businesses and designers are moving away from this pointless gimmick, which squanders visitors’ time and web owners’ money.
The Flash topic is one that many individuals are passionate about. In fact, the noted Backbone article prompted a prolonged Ubuntu Forums debate that involved more than 3,400 viewers, more than 300 votes and more than 100 responses.
How you present yourself on your website can make, maim or kill your business. But before you can even consider placing a word on your website, you need to establish a brand strategy.
Good to Great’s
best-selling author Jim Collins calls this the Hedgehog concept (based on the philosophy great companies know one big thing). He insists you need to grasp three intersecting elements:
1. What you can be the best in the world at
2. What drives your economic engine
3. What you are deeply passionate about
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Have you ventured ‘outside the box’ today?
Many businesses claim they’re innovative when it comes to the Internet, but few seem to demonstrate it.
Most stay on the cushy path, eagerly following cyber herds with the tried-and-true. “Why take a chance?” After all, going outside the box can be downright scary.
One group that relentlessly ventures into the unknown is “an ideas studio” named Burnkit, which is made up of 14 “thinkers” in Vancouver, BC.
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European web designers are churning out poor text legibility, unclear menus and confusing task flows, reveals a recent study by Forrester Research.
Nine top European web design agencies offered two of their best reference sites to the research group for rigorous review. Forrester reported it was surprised at the blunders, which it stated “are all well-researched usability problems, often with known solutions.”
The research group went on to state: “Customer experience experts can fix these problems by simply applying scenario design principles and better standards for text fonts and sizes, and by using web analytics to identify task-flow problem spots.”
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Why do so many businesses lack respect for online customers?
It’s bizarre, especially in this day and age with Internet usage and spending relentlessly on the rise. Perhaps with so many suspect websites hovering in cyberspace, even credible companies tend to lose perspective.
Maybe it’s time to start thinking of visitors as online guests. It’s a simple ‘mind shift’ that might get companies to better recognize how their websites communicate with those they intend to serve.
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More than 93% of Internet users indicated they favour speed and readability over appearance when visiting websites, according to a recent online poll conducted by Webcopyplus.
When Internet users were asked what’s likely to drive them away from a website:
- 51.2% indicated “slow load times”
- 42.2% specified “weak web copy”
- 6.6% noted “poor visual presentation”
- A total of 258 users participated in the web writing service provider’s online poll during a four-month period that ended in April of 2007.
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