I found this useful article published by Optimal Webworks. I think you will enjoy it too.
Are You Making These 9 Common Business Website Mistakes?
Sep 16th, 2008 | By Optimal Webworks | Category: Web Business Development
A company’s website is the most powerful and inexpensive marketing tool you can possibly use. So why is it that so many businesses pay little attention to making the website function properly? If you operate a website, or are in the midst of creating one for your website, study the following list of business website mistakes and compare these items to your site.
9 COMMON BUSINESS WEBSITE MISTAKES:
1. YOUR WEBSITE IS ABOUT YOU AND YOUR COMPANY Focusing your website on you and your business is no fault of your own. We often want to use our company website to discuss our services and tell our company story. Sadly, our company story isn’t the most sought-after information customers want. You company’s website should take aim at providing for your customers and site visitors. If your website fulfills a need, your audience has the potential to expand, exposing your company to new clients and customers.
2. YOUR WEBSITE DOES NOT SOLVE A PROBLEM Web users seek out businesses that can solve problems for them, not tell them what problems they have. Your customers know what problems they have. They want solutions. When writing about a service your business offers, rethink the content and instead write about the problem your service or product targets. In your content, explain possible solutions to the problem, including explaining how your product can help. But remember what we learned in mistake No. 1: Your website should NOT be all about YOU!
3. VISITORS NEED MORE THAN 4 SECONDS TO UNDERSTAND YOUR WEBSITE Are you a company that sells soups or soup bowls? Your website visitors won’t wait to find out. Website users often judge a website’s usefulness within a matter of seconds, and if you’re not ready, you may not get a second chance. Your business’s website must explain its purpose clearly and quickly.
4. YOUR WEBSITE DOES NOT TELL SITE VISITORS WHAT TO DO What is the purpose of your website? Why do you want people to visit? A better question is “What do you want visitors to do?” If the reason for your website is to get new customers to contact you, make sure your website leads users to the contact form. TELL VISITORS to contact you. Don’t make them guess what you want them to do. Obviously, we don’t want to order all of our new friends around, but we do want them to know exactly what they should do to get the most out of our website. Know what you want out of your website and help visitors perform accordingly.
5. VISITORS MUST LEARN HOW TO NAVIGATE YOUR SITE Website users don’t want to spend time learning how to use your website. Navigation must be intuitive, otherwise, new visitors may not be able to find what their looking for. Imagine that you have the perfect content on applying your wood sealer to an outside porch. However, a user must navigate through a number of pages just to find your “deck care” page. If your navigation isn’t intuitive, how many clicks do you think a new user will make before deciding to click back to Google?
6. WEBSITE DESIGN TAKES PRECEDENCE OVER CONTENT We all love great looking websites. We enjoy bright colors, sharp images, fancy text. It’s where business websites get into style over substance that they get into trouble. Building an website with an interesting design could get people to pause on your website a second longer. That’s true. But if a website visitor doesn’t understand what your site is about because content is overrun by distracting images and the visitor fails to find how your website addresses their problem, that visitor will likely think to themselves ‘that’s a good looking site’ and then return to Google to find another site that can fulfill their needs.
7. YOUR WEBSITE IS BUILT ENTIRELY IN FLASH Flash is GREAT! It’s really an amazing technology. But it’s not one that should build your website. Flash creates a number of problems, one of them main hindrances being that search engines have a tough time navigating your website. Flash also depends on users to have Flash plugins enabled in their browsers. Websites built in HTML and utilize CSS play much more nicely with search engines and increase your chances of being indexed. The better you rank in search engines, the higher your potential traffic. Building your website entirely in Flash greatly limits your website’s potential traffic.
8. YOUR WEBSITE IS OPTIMIZED FOR ONLY ONE BROWSER About 30 percent of all web users use the Mozilla Firefox browser. If 100 people visit your site in one day, potentially 30 of those visitors use the Firefox browser. If your website isn’t optimized to display properly in that browser, that’s 30 people that could likely be turned off by your website right off the bat. Already, we’ve seen a number of factors that can work against your website, from visitors’ short attention span to poor navigation to the wrong content. Make sure you website designer tests your website for proper display in all the recent browsers.
9. YOUR WEBSITE IMAGES CONTAIN TEXT Images are for visual accents, not text. And not search engines, because they can’t read text in images. Text is for your readers, and it helps search engines understand the purpose of your website. If any of your important text lies inside an image, search engines likely won’t be able to read your text and add any value to your page for keywords you may be targeting.
To contact them: www.optimalwebworks.com
“Every failure carries with it the seed of an equivalent advantage”.–Napoleon Hill
Filed under: Internet Marketing | Tagged: Building Websites, Business Websites Mistakes, Optimal Webworks, Web Business Development | Comments Off on Business Websites Mistakes | Optimal Webworks
Rio Guzman's Journal 