Let’s face facts. There are more bad sites, than good sites and far many more horrible sites than great sites. Even great web designers can make bad web design choices. And just about anyone can see a bad website when they happen to find one.
Business web sites tend to be real offends as the web is an easy way to generate easy sales leads, connect with customers, and cut overhead on advertising. But for whatever reason or a number of reasons, many sites suck in one of Five Ways
Building an Unsafe Structure
You may or may not know it, but your site may be built like that dog house your father made when you were a kid. You know, the one the dog is terrified to go into and later collapsed from slight breeze. An intuitive website, a useful website, has a great simple structure behind it where every page is logically organized and placed. Navigating a site should be a simple affair allowing visitors to find what they need quickly. Every piece of information flows logically to a customer wandering around the site leading to the call to action.
You can tell if you have failed this if your friends -who have never seen the site- visit the website and get confused or have to ask questions about where things are or how to do certain things.
Choice Madness
I’m guilty of this. In an effort to answer every possible question, I sometimes find myself loading up every possible choice a visitor can make on the front page. To a visitor looking for one or two answers, 20 possible choices is confusing and overwhelming. Its good to have lots of stuff on your site, but everything has its own place where it belongs.
If you know exactly what your site is supposed to be doing, selling, and promoting than that should be up front. For example, a store should bring the customer right into the sales page first with the best deals, bargins, and buy-now right there. A car dealership may want to showcase it’s top cars, brands, and contact information. A service company would want its services, a place for quotes, and customer service in easy to find places. And so on.
Imagine your site as a Funnel. The widest part is where customers come in, and the narrowest part is where you close the sale. If your site has more than one exit point or the funnel is too broad, then you will be waiting too long for a sale or missing them as leads leak pest you.
Meet Randy Randomous R Randoms.
You can put anything on the web. Damn near anything. But a bunch of random items thrown on a web site is silly, inconsistent, and unprofessional. The more random junk on a site, the worse it is. On any site, content should be arranged consistently, with clean consistent graphics, good spacing, and familar placement of non-content items, such as menus and banners.
While this is not so much an issue anymore with template designs and easy access to sets of graphics, it does creep in after time or if more than one person updates your website. Anyone can see if a web site has random junk tacked on or not. They can also see if the flow content breaks from the insertion of bits of text, such as unnatural keywords, or from the deletion of text.
The more random your content and site appears, the more it sucks and the less likely customers and visitors will return for serious business.
Getting Old
Nothing is wrong with old sites, but everything is wrong if that old site of yours shows its age. Just as people fight to stay looking young, your web site should as well. Certain things on the web come and go, some are hear to stay, and a few become standards that will always be a must. It is the last two you must pay attention to. When reviewing a site, a lot of things can be discarded or should be ready to discard because they are fads. A good example is the proliferation of social networking icons. I’ve seen sites with 30-50 of those little icons on the site. Only 6 of which where really relevant. Many of these icons are useless or will become useless. Be ready to dump them.
While not updating is a key point, updating for the sake of updating is just as bad. Often these updates will contain no useful information which wastes a customer’s time. Update with relevant information and if you run a blog on your site, make sure you have a set schedule for updates. Normally I tell my clients to pick out 4 or 5 items for a month which relates to your company, services, products, and customers and post one a week or every other week. If you don’t have a blog, keep last-updated dates off of pages as you would other annoyances.
Another part of a site getting old is the use of dated styles for the design. Certain styles have no place on a web site today, like animated gifs and ‘click here’ and splash pages.
Welcome to Generation NOW!
Thanks to computers, a culture of Now, and ever pressing deadlines, people are impatient for what you have on your site. Don’t make them wait. They won’t. Your competitors won’t wait for you to screw up, they’ll exploit it. As a result, you make your customers wait for you. Serve them now with what they need, the result will be that they come back to your site and send even more traffic your way. Even more so if you give provide genuine help and answers to questions.
I’ve long said, the web shouldn’t be treated as regular TV/print/sales ads and more like a direct person to person conversation. If your customers and visitors feel like you are communicating and genuinely trying to help them get their needs met, they will slow down and respect that and listen to what you have to offer.
If you ignore them and proceed with your sales pitch and slam them with industry buzzwords, they will come to see you as ignoring them and as another salesman with a slimy pitch. On the web, this is an almost unforgivable sin a site can commit as once you break the trust your visitors and customers give you, they will never trust it again.
And then your site will really suck.
