Many business owners want their website to be eye-catching, but they often overlook other, equally important factors which determine not only the amount of traffic to your website, but the quality of that traffic and, ultimately, your conversion rate. Here are a few of those factors:
- Your site is confusing. Eye-catching is one thing, but is it clear to a visitor where important information about your business is located? I frequently come across sites which fail to provide easy navigation schemes, thereby hindering my quest to find the information I’m looking for. Make sure your site makes sense and that everything is easy to find and follow.
- You still have a site that plays background music. Newsflash: this was cool, oh, about fifteen years ago, back in the days when everything about the ‘net was new and exciting. In this day and age, with sites like Youtube, ESPN, etc. sound is no big deal. Visitors want sound when they want it; they don’t want it shoved in their faces when they visit your site.
- Your text is illegible. I’m frequently amazed at the sites that feature text that is too small, light against a light background, or dark against a dark background. What are these people thinking? Sometimes, in our quest to get “design cute”, we can go overboard. Make sure visitors can read your text.
- Your site opens with a flash intro. See item #2, above. Like background music, flash doesn’t “wow” anyone anymore; I personally find it to be more of a nuisance to get through than anything. As a matter of fact, it can hurt your search engine rankings. Lose it.
Allways remember: an ugly, but well-structured, easy-to-read website with few hindrances is better than a beautiful, flash-heavy, hard-to-navigate site. Fortunately you can have the best of both worlds. And after all, aren’t sales/conversions really what you’re after?