Common Website Mistakes

There are some common mistakes or ways that service providers tend to approach their website that at best do not help and at worse turn off your potential customer.

The most important website problem for non technical service providers is an asthetic problem. There is an immediate gut reaction that Gen X and younger people have to a website. Within seconds we can tell you things like:

• are you professional
• are you trustworthy
• do you know how what I am looking for (or are you all about YOU?)
• are you worth my time?

You may think your credentials alone make you worthy of attention on the web but in fact the design and layout of a website speaks volumes. For example for The First Dance we told our webmaster we wanted a trustworthy, calm website that speaks to a younger, more female audience. What he created was fresh, clean and young but still excudes a sense of calm and trust. For Marriage Friendly Therapists we also wanted to build a sense of trust and professionalism. Later we wanted to reconfirm our brand as a website for married couples (as compared to individual therapy.) Our webmaster added the couples to the top of the website. Since then we learned about search engine optimization and moved a lot more text to our front page.

Too much or too little content

One of the struggles with search engine optimization is that many webmasters don't believe that websites should be designed exclusively for search engines. SEO websites can be very cluttery and so crammed with information the web user is overwhelmed. Design gets lost and you end up with a cluttery mess. It's a constant tension between showing the feelings you want to express with design and being useful to search engines.

Links - nobody cares but you!

A common myth is that 'links are crucial to website traffic.' This is true but it is INCOMING links to your website not external links that are key. You have to ask yourself why would your website reader care about your links to other resources? If those resources are really important you should add them to your actual website text, blending them in a paragraph (with a link as I did above when I mentioned The First Dance.) This will help tell your customer why they should go to that link and that you value it enough to put it "front and center", not hidden away on some "links page". Google is the ultimate links page, afterall!

Read more in the Website Mistakes area of my blog