Having a website is a good thing, right? An essential thing even…right?
Right.
With conditions.
Having a quality website for your business is essential now. Particularly since Coronavirus and the new way businesses are learning to operate, having a quality and accessible website is a requirement for doing business today. (There are, as always, exceptions to this rule and you will know best what’s required in your industry)
But, there is something worse than having no website, regardless of your industry or specific business situation.
Having an out of date website!
Website visitors are fickle and have short attention spans. In fact, did you know that studies show even goldfish have longer attention spans than we do?
GOLDFISH!
Anyway, that is a soapbox for another day.
So, fickle visitors and out of date websites. Right.
Imagine you are searching for something online, a business to provide a specific service for you. Now imagine you find the perfect business! From what the search results say, this is exactly what you have been looking for!
You click the results, the page opens…and OMG! It has bold color backgrounds, Flash, funky fonts and is the busiest website you’ve ever seen!
Now, do you want to continue on and do business with them?
Probably not. If you’re like me, you’re going to bounce back to Google and try the next link you see, never looking back or thinking of that first site again.
Since you don’t want to suffer the same fate as website one in the example above, take a few minutes today and make sure that you aren’t committing some of these capital crimes against our web browsing senses.
You have a splash page
You know the kind…the large image page with your logo and an enter button. The kind that is just there to look pretty and slow you down when you’re trying to find something. These were popular in the 90s, but today they are an annoyance at best, a visitor repellant at worst. Oh. And Google doesn’t love them either!
“Good web design isn’t about manipulating Google or visitors to see value in your site. It’s about providing value and partnering with Google to give your visitors what they want.”
Media on your site autoplays
Again, popular a decade or two ago, this is no longer welcome. In fact, it can cause a lot of issues for people. From making unwelcome sounds and alerting those around that you are not getting your work done to using limited data plans to stream information they weren’t ready for, autoplay is an old way of trying to manipulate the visitor into consuming your information. Now it’s time to work a bit harder. Label your media. Write some compelling copy to get people to view or listen to it. But leave the choice to them.
Your design is cluttered and afraid of white space
Clean is in, and cluttered is out. Think Marie Kondo for websites. If what you are putting up doesn’t have a purpose, it doesn’t belong on your website. Reading websites is hard on the eyes and the mind. Keeping white space on the page helps people to consume your information. Include images to break up the text, but keep it clean looking. Anything else will chase visitors off.
Your site has Flash animation in it
Most browsers, including mobile devices, don’t support Flash animation anymore. Too many moving parts and animation is sure to turn people off. It looks amateurish and outdated. Instead opt for some light movement on your site to keep interest. Buttons that change when you hover over them, small movements and transformation on your site works to keep interest and not bog down your site with heavy load times and complicated HTML code.
“It’s not about getting the traffic. It’s about getting quality and targeted traffic who want what you offer, and giving them what they want.”
Your site takes too long to load
Remember the goldfish thing I was telling you about earlier? Yeah, nowhere is that more true than asking visitors to wait while your really cool pages load! If your site is taking longer than 2 seconds to load, it’s time to have someone optimize it for you. That is an ambitious goal, but one that you should work on if you are hoping to keep as many visitors as possible.
“What gets measured gets improved.”
These are 5 key ways you can find out if your website is outdated. These are all fixable items, some will take a few hours of work, others will require an overhaul of your existing site.
Each of them, however, will be well worth the time spent and will return a positive ROI on any monies spent on it.
If you are ready to give your website an honest look, and would like to work with a team whose philosophy is to empower entrepreneurs to understand and manage their technology, we’d love to talk with you! Schedule your FREE website consult here. You can ask any questions you’d like, even if you aren’t ready to hire a developer yet!
