Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered online weak and weary, a horrific website appeared in front of me…
Here are my website nightmares.
1. Being Cloak and Dagger About Your Business
When you’re creating your website or having your website created, it can be all too easy to overlook the basics. After all, you know what your business does and the purpose of your website, but is it easy enough for a newcomer to understand? You might be a ‘Dynamic and powerful company breaking the mould and increasing ROI with incredible testimonials and 99.99999% success rate that’s ready to explode your inbound leads’, but what do you actually do?
Make your services/products clear and identifiable; link to testimonials with statements about what you did for that client for clear demonstrations. It helps to have someone who doesn’t know what you do look over the website and give you their thoughts and impressions.
2. Your Website is a Head(ing)less Horseman
Most people will skim website text, especially if it is particularly dense and they’re gaining initial impressions. If you’re not emphasising using H1 headings and H2 Subheadings, they’re possibly skimming over the things you want them to pay attention to. More importantly, it makes a huge difference to SEO. Google will also read your H1 tags and add emphasis on how people find your website using the terms in your headings.
3. Night of the living Ads
Picture this, you’re on a website looking for a service, you click through a few pages and an ad pops up. One of three things is about to happen; you’re going to ignore/close the ad, you’re going to click the ad, or you’re going to try and close the ad, accidentally open it, and get frustrated. If your website has ads running on it, is it worth the extra revenue? Online advertisements are more relevant to users than ever before, and if not relevant they’re just annoying. When you run ads on your website not only are you distracting the user and potential client, you’re also increasing the odds of them going to another website or just getting frustrated and having a bad experience.
4. Design Mistakes That Suck More Than Vampires
With more websites live than ever before and more businesses using creative means to attract new custom, sticking out can be a bit tricky. Design is certainly a skill, and the world of design trends is constantly changing, but sometimes it can be a bad thing to be totally different from the rest. Research modern design trends, look at other websites and see what works and what doesn’t. Stay away from what doesn’t. Make sure you aren’t compromising user experience for design too. Minimalist websites look great, but if the website is so minimalist and subtle that your users can’t find the menu bar, is it really working? Poor designs can lead to high bounce rates, and business websites aren’t always the best forum to express yourself…
5. Ghost Links
This one isn’t a play on words to fit the spooky theme. Ghost Links are real and we don’t need paranormal hunters to prove they exist. A ghost link is something that used to link to a page that got moved or deleted, but the link still exists. Ghost links are bad for user experience as they send people to somewhere that doesn’t exist (not alternate dimensions, sorry pinhead), and they can also be bad for SEO rankings.
Fortunately, you don’t need an exorcist to get rid of them, you can just delete the link path yourself!
Don’t let your website be the scariest thing this Halloween, get in touch for a website review and we’ll give you a solution on how to fix it without making a deal with the devil.
