10 Mistakes On Your Website That Could Put Off Potential Customers…
Carrying out total re-designs of websites is a large part of our business. Many of our clients have websites that were designed initially by themselves, a friend, family member, or using a template package that they bought for a few pounds online. It’s a cliché, but I’m going to say it anyway - you get what you pay for. Just having a website is one of those areas where I would say with no uncertainty at all, that something is DEFINITELY NOT better than nothing. In fact, it can be detrimental to your business:
“A company that neglects its website may be committing commercial suicide. A website is increasingly becoming the gateway to a company’s brand, products and services…. A useless website suggests a useless company, and a rival is only a mouse-click away.”
Economist Magazine
To help you decide whether you need to give your website some attention, we have created a checklist of ten of the most common web design mistakes that are off-putting to potential customers. The most accurate analogy I could think of, was that if this were a driving test, these would all count as Major Faults, where you only have to have made one mistake from the list to potentially fail:
10 Mistakes… The Checklist
- It takes more than 4 seconds for everything on the Home Page (or any page) to load
- Your website uses a ‘splash page’ (an initial page from which visitors then have to ‘click to enter site’)
- Visitors have difficulty reading the text on your site because it is too small, or the font is in a style/colour that is hard to read
- The website doesn’t look the same/hasn’t been tested to see if it actually works in different browsers (i.e. different versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.)
- Not all of the links work
- The information is out of date
- Logos/images/photographs are bad scans or low resolution (making them out-of-focus/blurry)
- Visitors cannot quickly and easily find the information they are looking for - the navigation is not intuitive
- The site’s content is not engaging/relevant/well-written
- The site is simply unattractive, and doesn’t accurately represent the quality of product/service you offer
