Could Your Website Be Bad For Business?
A modern, well designed website is essential in today's sales and marketing atmosphere. An effective website attracts people to your company's online presence, provides valuable information about your services and products, and can even lay the foundation for a sale.
Yet with great power comes great responsibility - a good website is a boon, but a bad one is a blight. As Malcolm Gladwell, author of international bestsellers "The Tipping Point," and "Blink," writes, "your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions" (more about this here). If your company has a bad website, those two seconds can turn away business quicker than, as Gladwell would say, the blink of an eye. A poorly maintained or outdated website can damage credibility, thwart search engine optimization (SEO), and make a company look obsolete.
We're not going to name names, but we've noticed a few packaging and plastics companies who have poorly designed websites. The good news: whether or not a website is already effective, there are simple ways every website can be improved.
Below are the top 5 mistakes we've noticed on packaging and plastics industry sites, and tips to avoid them. Read on, and don't let your company's website fall prey to these mistakes:
1. Too much stuff, too little organization. Your site should be as easy to navigate as it is easy on the eye. It's good to have a lot of content - content provides valuable information, and helps search engine optimization - but organization is key. When you're planning a site design or redesign, think information organization first. Build an uncluttered, welcoming site.
2. Hard to read. Make sure text clearly stands out against its background, is large enough, and is generally easy to read. If you have black font on a dark blue background, you're making it too difficult on your visitor. Focus on function and detail. Another killer is teeny-tiny font. Sure, visitors can zoom in, but you don't want to make your visitors work to get information - you want it to leap out at them. Also, sans-serifs fonts, such as Arial and Verdana, are online standards. Times New Roman is a big no-no.
3. Distracting animations. Wait a minute, you might be thinking, didn't you just tell us to make information leap out? Well, yes, and animated images do that well in moderation, but do the opposite in excess. If there's too much obnoxious flashing and animation on your site, (like on this one), you're probably scaring away new business. You want your site to be welcoming, not annoying.
4. Slow to load. If your site loads slowly, your images are probably at fault. Having lots of awesome images can be great, but not if they slow everything down. Slow loading images can ruin your design, turn away traffic, and discourage visitors from continuing to browse. Adjust the quality of your images so they will load quickly. Image editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop often have a "Save for Web" function that automatically creates a small, quick loading .gif file.
5. Broken links. This one is a no-brainer: no one likes broken links. They make your company look incompetent, and frustrate visitors. However, broken links can also be hard to fix - it takes effort and time to check every link on a page, and perseverance to recheck every now and then. Checking for broken links is tedious - but if you catch a broken link before a potential customer does, it's worth it.
You may be wondering, how do I measure my website's success?
Don't spend time redesigning and updating your website if you're not going to measure your success. There are simple ways to measure whether or not your website is creating new business or scaring it away. Every website strategy should involve testing, whether it's A/B splits, or having a few people at your company give you direct feedback.
Free tools such as Google Analytics provide simple metrics to measure effectiveness. For example, bounce rate (how many people leave your site after only viewing one page) and time on site will tell you if visitors are sticking around or running away.
About the Author:
Len Ostroff is the President and CEO of Informous. Check out Informous' blog for more like this. Find information on packaging and plastics on Informous.
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