The whole purpose of a company or business website is to attract visitors and persuade them to part with their money on your products or services. It sounds easy enough, yet far too many websites are actually putting prospective customers off through simple errors. Make sure you’re website isn’t guilty of any of the following website sins.
Check Your Content
According to an article on the eMarketer site, over 40% of those surveyed reported that spelling and grammatical errors would be enough to send them elsewhere online. Spellcheck programmes shouldn’t be relied on as they can’t assess the context in which you use a word – think of ‘threw’ and ‘through’ for example – so double check your work and get it proofread by someone who knows their grammar.
Contact Information
Far too many sites concentrate on getting across the message about how great their promoted goods and services are, leaving the potential customer keen to move forward and make that all-important purchase – only to be let down at the final hurdle by a lack of contact information. Xapsis Marketing Blog urges all site managers to ensure that a call to action is prominently displayed, along with the necessary contact details. Customers want to know who you are, where you are and how to get in touch with you, so make it easy for them to find out.
Is Your Site Accessible?
Just because your website displays and scrolls perfectly on your own computer, don’t assume that every visitor is going to have the same experience. With such a host of devices and platforms that can now be used to connect to the Internet, the canny site manager will ensure that every single user, no matter what the hardware and software he or she uses to access the World Wide Web, has the same great experience. That means fast-loading pages which allow visitors to read text, view images and scroll seamlessly through your content.
Professional assistance ensures that every aspect of web design and development is aimed towards giving visitors a great online experience, and many firms can handle every single aspect of the process to give you absolute peace of mind. For example Web Equator, a company which specialises in web development in Berkshire, can help with every aspect of website creation and development from the initial research through design, bug testing and maintenance tasks. Most web developers understand that you want to be able to control your own content through easy-to-use content management systems, so you don’t have to pay for every little change.
Site Navigation
Visitors want to find the products and services that interest them quickly and easily, without trawling through several different menus and pages to get there. Try to keep menus as short and meaningful as possible and make it easy for your visitors to find the things they want.
By the same token, make sure that links – both internal and external – are working correctly. Dead and faulty links are annoying at best and unprofessional at worst, so don’t allow them to remain.