Making people and ideas findable
10 Reasons Every Business Should Not Only Have A Website, But A Good One.
1. Easy to Navigate.
Have you ever been given horrible driving directions to someone’s house? I bet you were frustrated when you took wrong turns, were confused on which way to go, wound up at the wrong house, and as a result showed up late. Well, website navigation is no different than driving directions. Make sure your website is easy to navigate!
Helpful tips:
1. Make sure all of your links work.
2. Do not make a visitor click more than twice to get to important information.
3. Place a home button on every page so your visitor can easily get back to the main page.
2. Do not use clip art.
Ok, clip art went out with bellbottoms. Yes, it’s that old school. You are running a business and you need to look professional and clip art doesn’t do it for you. You will instantly lose credibility when a visitor loads your site and is presented with clip art.
Helpful tips:
1. Uninstall clip art from your computer just in case you are tempted to use it.
2. If you can’t create professional graphics, hire someone who can. It will do wonders for your image.
3. Do not use every color in the Sherwin Williams paint deck.
Painting each room in your house a different color is one thing, but using every color of the color wheel on your website is another. Be consistent with your color scheme. If you choose blue and grey, stick with it throughout the entire site.
Helpful tips:
1. Use colors that are easy on the eyes. Stay away from bright background colors like hot pink and bright yellow. You will blind your visitors. No one should have to wear sunglasses while looking at your site.
4. You’ve got 10 seconds. Don’t waste it on a flash intro.
Some “experts” may disagree with me on this topic, but if you only have 10 seconds to impress a visitor, why would you make them wait or jump through a hoop to see your important information? Exactly. You wouldn’t. How impatient do we get when we have to wait for something? Don’t do that to a potential customer. They will leave your website before getting to the “good stuff”.
Helpful tips:
1. When a potential customer types in www.yourdomain.com it should go straight to the home page where they are greeted with the important information they came to find.
2. Save your money and put it towards marketing your business.
5. Easy DJ, this aint no disco.
Unless you are a band*, do not put background music on your website. But Marsh has background music when you shop, why can’t I provide soothing jazz to entice customers? To be honest, it’s annoying and distracting.
*If you are a band, make sure your fans can mute the music.
6. Where do I sign up?
Always offer your visitors the ability to sign up for some type of newsletter, coupon feed, and/or e-mail updates. If your visitors are interested in more information a “sign up for more information” form is a perfect way to capture those interested visitors and turn them into future customers.
Helpful tips:
1. Place your form on every page.
7. How does it look now? What about now? And now?
Your website needs to look and function the same in ALL web browsers. Yes, there are more browsers than just Internet Explorer and your website must look and function the same in all of them. What looks great in Internet Explorer might not look so great or even function properly in Mozilla Firefox.
Helpful tips:
1. If you are hiring someone to design your website make sure you tell them (a good designer will already have this covered) that you want proof the website works in all major browsers.
8. Provide contact information on every page.
You’ve got them interested and they are reaching for their phone to place an order, but wait, they can’t find your number! Make sure you have your contact information on every page so customers can easily find how to contact you to place that order.
9. Slow and steady doesn’t win the race.
If the children’s story were re-written for the Internet, the rabbit would have won. Make sure your website doesn’t take years to load. Better yet, make sure it doesn’t take minutes. Remember the ten-second rule with the flash intro? The same applies with general load time. Your visitors will find a faster way to find the information they are looking for and chances are it will be from a competitor’s website. You just lost a sale because your website loads too slow.
Helpful tips:
1. Large images, a plethora of pictures, and flash movies slow down load times.
10. Too much clutter.
I’ve heard it a million times “Will, I just have so much information to share. I want to post it all on my website.” Our lives are surrounded by clutter and we don’t need one more website with a billion pictures and information to add to our cluttered lives. Keep your website simple and clean and your customers will thank you. Think of it like this, how often can you find that shirt you love to wear in your cluttered closet? How nice would it be to open the closet and find that favorite shirt hanging right in front of you? Think clean closet before loading up your site with information.
Creating good websites isn’t rocket science. It just takes a little bit of common sense. A good way to discern what is good and bad is to think about what annoys, frustrates, distracts, confuses, and overloads you the next time you visit a website. Questions, comments, or for more information please contact Will Hardison at will@mediaplug.biz.
8 Comments
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Comment by Will Hardison on September 12, 2008 at 12:50pm - Please add your own tips and advice!
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Comment by Erik Deckers on September 12, 2008 at 3:36pm - Tip for #10. If you have a lot of information to put on your website, you CAN share it. But put it on other pages instead. For one of my old websites, I used a frequently asked questions page with a lot of construction terms on it, and then referred people to a Frequently Asked Construction Questions page. That page even got a lot of visits.
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Comment by Lorraine Ball on September 13, 2008 at 9:09am -
Will great post!
I would add the following: Your site is about pictures and words! Spend time refining your message.. include the terms people are likely to use when they search for business.
If you are determined to put more then a few lines of copy on any page - be sure to break the copy up, with headings and sub-heads (note: this is probably all most visitors will read, so make sure the headings tell a story.)
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Comment by George Roots on September 13, 2008 at 8:10pm -
I'm not so sure websites actually help businesses in any productive way, shape, or form....
:D
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Comment by Will Hardison on September 14, 2008 at 1:39pm
- Care to explain more on that George? I'm interested to hear your angle..
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Comment by Angel Morales on September 14, 2008 at 2:39pm - Will - I know this was a primer - as there are still alot of business out there who are "just getting started" - how about a follow up post for the top things a business website need to consider in the next 2 years. Stuff like "experience optimization" and behavioral based content targeting...I'd love to foward a post like that to some of my retail peers.
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Comment by George Roots on September 14, 2008 at 9:47pm
- Oh, I was watching too much political debating...just thought I'd throw that out there and see what came back! I'm actually a developer myself, my angle was humor...
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Comment by Nichole Wermer on November 16, 2008 at 6:05pm - Will, do you develop websites? I just created a basic site and I definitely need LOTS of help! I want to appear very professional - because I am - and I don't feel that my site is doing that. It looks a bit like a fifth grader created it : ) you could check it out and let me know your ideas. http://jsdcreativebusinesssolutions.com
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