Making the most of your website

So you finally got around to building a website, but now you are wondering why it’s not driving the results you had hoped for.

That could be because you are falling into one of the four big traps business owners often overlook on a start-up website. Let me share with you some points to consider, and a little advice on how you can right your wrongs online.

1. Making customers click too much?

Blame it on society’s increasingly shortened attention span, but most websites overestimate the number of hoops their customers are willing to jump through in order to get to the product or service they are looking for.

Every single click is an action point. When people get distracted by different actions, they don’t click on the one button you want them to.

A little advice: Decide what action you want customers to take, whether it’s making a call, finding your address, or placing an order, and emphasise that button over all others.

2. Thinking about mobile last (or not at all)?

According to the National Small Business Association’s 2013 small business technology survey, only 1 out of 5 business owners has a mobile (or responsive) website. That is progress, however, most of those business owners are not making the best use of the fact that they have a mobile website, because they are still designing for the Web. As mobile traffic becomes increasingly important, entrepreneurs should begin designing their websites with ‘mobile ready’ first in mind.

A good mobile website, should look like an app. Users should be able to navigate it by swiping, rather than clicking, a motion that is native to the mobile phone. There should also be a constant action point visible to users, so they do not have to zoom in and out to get what they want and where you want them to be.

A little advice: Start by thinking about your mobile website and then bring that experience to the Web, it can fix a lot of other problems.

3. Using overly complex, jargon-laden descriptions?

Entrepreneurs, brilliant though they may be, are often terrible at explaining what they actually do. Face-to-face, there is time for clarification. On a website, there is not.

Most business owners can suffer from simply knowing too much. They try to tell everything they know about themselves or their services to users in a short period of time, and in the end users can be confused about who they are and what they offer.

A little advice: Try to distil your value proposition into one sentence, keeping in mind that once you hook a customer with a clear, concise pitch, you will likely have time to expand later.

4. Too much content?

Different from trap No. 3, this is not a matter of what you are writing, but how much you are writing.

Thinking about mobile first should alleviate this problem, because mobile websites have less space. Instead, whenever possible, use a video, diagram, or other type of media to get your message across.

A little advice: If it is just your website, and not an article or something people want to read, the less text you have, the better and more beautiful it will be.

For more on mobile ready or responsive website design click here!