Is your website failing your business? 30 reasons why… Part 3
After another cliffhanger last week here’s the final part in our list of 30 reasons why your website is failing your business.
We meet a lot of people who are wondering whether or not they should invest their hard earned cash in a website redesign. They’ve already spent (sometimes a significant amount of) money and yet, for some reason, their web site doesn’t seem to be delivering results for their business. When we look at their site the reasons are usually pretty obvious but sometimes they’re more obscure.
Occasionally we have to tell people that their site is in fact doing more harm than good and that’s never a happy moment.
Here’s the final part of a list that, although by no means exhaustive, covers lots of the more common problems. Some of these things are more significant than others but they all have an impact. Let me know what you think….
21. Not accessible
I’ve alluded to this elsewhere in this series. In this day and age you have a duty to try and make your site as accessible to as many people as possible regardless of their ability. I know a blind lady who knows more about the internet that you and I put together. She has a large disposable income, shops online regularly and does lots of research online for business. If she comes across a site that isn’t accessible she won’t phone you up instead she’ll just go elsewhere. There is also legislation on the horizon in the UK which will mean that your site (B2C sites first), will have to be accessible.
22. Poor usability
If a user has to engage their brain in order to use your website then it’s too complex. Do the granny test again or ask a five year old to accomplish some tasks on your website. Usability is a science in its own right but think about gadgets and websites that are pleasure to use – that’s good usability.
23. No call to action
You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to attract users to your website but are you asking visitors to your website to do something? Here’s a clue – the answer should be yes? It could be as simple as calling you (’call us now!’), or buying something (’buy now’). The web is direct, immediate and fast. Don’t muck about just ask the question. Be clear and maybe even be cheeky.
24. Long sign up process
Don’t do it. On the web you need to remove as much guff as possible from your sign up processes. Think about Amazon and their one click buying process or The Book Depository with their checkout and sign-up on one page process. The more steps in any process and the more likely it is that people will drop out. The more personal information that you ask for and the more likely it is that people will drop out. Don’t lose business simply because you have some need to know your customer’s inside leg measurement. Unless you sell trousers online of course.
25. Frames
You might not even know if you site has been built using frames but any web designer can tell you – maybe for free. Your customers won’t be able to bookmark pages when they’re in your site so even if they find something they’re interested in they won’t be able to come back. But they’ll be so irritated by this time they probably won’t want to. I wouldn’t. Search engines don’t like them and find it hard to see the content – if they can’t see the content they can’t index you properly so they won’t. If a customer enters on a subpage they might find that some or all of the navigation is missing. Again, do you really want to irritate your potential customers?
26. Excessive use of Flash or Flash intros
Flash is a proprietary software that is useful for creating cool web effects and animations. Some websites are built entirely in Flash. They often look really cool. Oh, unless you’re using an iPhone. Or an iPad. Or you live in the country and have a slow web connection. There’s a lot of debate amongst developers about the use of Flash but essentially content displayed in Flash is largely inaccessible, it can slow down a website, if you’re one of the 2 million iPhone users in the UK it’s invisible and there are alternatives available. As for flash intros, read #3 again and add that argument to this one.
27. Ads that users can skip
There are some very big sites that have video ads that appear when you go to their website. You can skip the ad if you can find the little cross in the corner but essentially you are forced to watch an advert before you can see the content you’re looking for. The only organisations that can get away with this have unique and compelling content that cannot be found elsewhere. If you think you’d like to earn some extra pennies with this kind of advertising you’d better be certain that people will tolerate the ads.
28. You hired a black hat
Did someone promise you the top spot on Google? Did you hire them? The only people that can promise the top spot on Google is Google. And they won’t. Apologies to all the self proclaimed ‘web gurus’ out there but that’s a cold hard fact. The chances are that if you hire someone and within a couple of weeks you ended up in that coveted number one spot (for a competitive search term), they did something to deliberately fool the search engines. It’s impressive and exciting. Briefly. As soon as Google et al recognise that you’ve manipulated them (your site remember), they will penalise you and send you tumbling back down the rankings. There are legitimate ways to work your way up the rankings so hire a professional and be patient.
29. Meaningless domain name
Before you leap in and buy a domain name have a good hard think about it. If you sell toffees and your name’s John Smith you should probably steer clear of johnsmith.com. That said jsmithtoffeemaker.com is probably a good bet – not to mention probably available. If possible try to make the name describe an action rather than an identity (although it might be possible to do both). Always go for a top level if you can .com .org or .co.uk. If you end up with jsmithtoffeemaker.tv everyone will think you’re an online tv channel.
30. It’s not your website, it’s you
If you have a website and people get in touch with you then please, please respond to them. Quickly. The web is instant. It’s all about instant gratification, instant information, instant availability, instant everything. If you think it can wait until later, you’re sadly mistaken. I recently made an enquiry for the same product on four different websites. One didn’t respond at all. One responded within 24 hours – not bad. One responded within 11 minutes – much better. The company that got my order responded to me in three minutes flat. They were quick, keen and professional. This stuff isn’t easy but you can develop processes that allow you to respond very quickly even if you’re a tiny company.
Essentially all of these things require attention because they adversely affect the users experience on your website and with your business. If there’s one lesson to take away from this series of posts it’s that visitors to your site will not tolerate a poor experience.
If your web site is out of date we can advise you on a sensible and cost effective way to put it right. If you ultimately need a new site and we design and build it for you, you now know of at least 30 things that won’t let it down.
The next blog post will be along shortly. I promise no more cliffhangers for a while but you don’t want to miss out you can subscribe to the blog. If it’s easier just let us know and we’ll send it to you in an email.
Ursus Media are based in Swindon, Wiltshire and specialise in web design, development, eCommerce and online marketing for small and medium businesses throughout the South West.
Is your website failing your business? 30 reasons why… Part 2
After last week’s merciless cliffhanger here’s part two in our list of 30 reasons why your website is failing your business.
We meet a lot of people who are wondering whether or not they should invest their hard earned cash in a website redesign. They’ve already spent (sometimes a significant amount of) money and yet, for some reason, their web site doesn’t seem to be delivering results for their business. When we look at their site the reasons are usually pretty obvious but sometimes they’re more obscure.
Occasionally we have to tell people that their site is in fact doing more harm than good and that’s never a happy moment.
Here’s a list that, although by no means exhaustive, covers lots of the more common problems. Some of these things are more significant than others but they all have an impact. Let me know what you think….
11. There’s no useful information on your site
It’s an old chestnut but content really is king. Remove your ego and pop it back in it’s box because your website is not for you; it’s for your visitors. Now provide the information that customers or potential customers actually want, put it in order of importance and then finally design and build your website around it.
12. Poor colour combinations
There are issues here beyond the fact that your site might be ugly and hurt your visitors eyes (although you should probably try and avoid that). If you get the balance of colours wrong you will make your site less visible to people with visual or cognitive problems. Your website should be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.
13. Disabled back button
If you’re web developer has disabled the browser back button you need to give them a slap. It does not serve to keep people on your site in the hope that they might buy; it just irritates them. And they’ll leave anyway.
14. Too much text
But don’t overdo it. People looking at text on screen will typically only read about 25% what they would on paper. Don’t waste your time or theirs.
15. No or (worse) poor quality images
The web is a visual medium so make the most of it. If the picture on your TV is poor you change channels and visitors to your website will do the same.
16. It’s old
If you haven’t done any work to design or (god forbid), content for the last year your site is out of date. Even if the coding is up to date. Ignore your website at your peril it’s costing you business right now. Update at least some content monthly (minimum), weekly (better) or even daily (ideal). You don’t have to do much but the search engines love a constantly updated website and as an added bonus your visitors will appreciate it too. Regularly making small changes to the design of your site will keep it fresh and save you money. There’s no need to wait for your website to get old and outmoded so why should you. Little and often is key so budget time and money for it and you’ll never have to do a costly redesign.
17. Did you make it yourself?
We can tell, your customers can tell and the people who would have been your customers could tell. You wouldn’t print your glossy catalogue that you send out to 100,000 people yourself using a photocopier, you wouldn’t paint your logo and phone number on the back of your van with a tin of Dulux… well here’s the newsflash: your website is the catalogue that you can put in front of every single person on the planet with a computer. Of all the things that you could try and do yourself building the website for your business has the biggest consequences. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh but don’t devalue your business by cutting corners. Designing and building high quality web sites that can grow and evolve with your business is harder than it looks. But don’t worry – we can help.
18. Poor navigation
Visitors need to be able to find their way around your website and they do so using the navigation – the bits that say ‘Home’, ‘About’, ‘Blog’. Consistent, easy to use navigation is essential for a good user experience and the navigation should be completely unobtrusive. Here’s an apology on behalf of an entire industry – web designers and developers like to show off their skills and this quite often results in navigation that’s too clever for it’s own good. If you’ve got funky but inconsistent, unfathomable navigation your visitors won’t see it as an enticing puzzle. They’ll see it as an irritation and move on. And you’ll never know.
19. Orphaned pages
Related to #18. This is what happens when someone clicks on a link on your site and then finds they can’t get back and the navigation’s disappeared. Again users will get frustrated and just leave. But they’re not the only ones. We’ve done some work recently for a client whose old website had 42 pages jam packed with useful information. Unfortunately because some (quite a lot), of these pages were orphans Google thought the site only had 8 pages. That’s 34 pages that never ever came up in searches no matter how perfect they would have been for the visitor. 34 opportunities to catch potential customers gone. Forever. You get the picture.
20. Click to enter
Don’t do this. Just don’t. The only exception to this rule is if you’re an artist or a photographer with ‘virtual’ gallery of some sort.
21. Not accessible…
…oh no it’s as frustrating as the cliffhanger at the end of 40 year old episodes of Flash Gordon at the Saturday Morning Cinema Club.
Part three will be right along next week. It’s the last one and if you don’t want to miss it you can subscribe to the blog. If it’s easier just let us know and we’ll send it to you in an email.
Bounce rate – the most useful metric?
Web analytics tools can deliver a vast amount of information to you about your website and your business. Arguably one of the most useful metrics is the bounce rate. Bounce rate tells you about visitors who have literally ‘bounced’ away without visiting any other parts of your site.
A great way to measure the quality of traffic to your website, the bounce rate is easy to understand and communicate to the other parts of your business and can help identify the areas in which your site is failing your visitors.
In the following video Google’s Avinash Kaushik explains why he thinks the bounce rate metric is so useful:
If your marketing efforts are effective the amount of quality traffic to your website will increase, therefore fewer users will bounce away and the percentage will go down.
So the 20 million dollar question -- what constitutes a good bounce rate? Well, the lower the better. Remember you will never be able to reduce your bounce rate to zero but a good figure for a business website is around 30%. If you can achieve this, or even reduce it, you’ll find that your all important conversion rates will go up.
A note to bloggers: don’t panic! Blogs are different. Visitors are often attracted to your site by a single relevant post, they’ll enter your site at the post and may well navigate away again after they’ve read it or by clicking on a useful link that you’ve provided. This doesn’t mean you haven’t attracted quality traffic; it’s just the nature of blogging. There’s still a rule of thumb metric for you though. If you can achieve a bounce rate of 50% or less you’re doing well.
Forthcoming related posts will include more ideas for getting the most from your analytics tools. If you want to keep up why don’t you subscribe to our feed?
Related posts:
Google ranks pages by speed
In the last few days Google announced that they have again made changes to their ranking algorithm. That’s the clever mathematical bit of Google that works out how far up (or down), the list your website appears.
Before Christmas we saw a major change which for the first time had Google paying close attention to real time search results. This meant that using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook suddenly had real impact when it came to position on Google’s search pages.
The latest change takes into account the speed with which web pages load and could see slow loading sites falling down in the Google league tables.
Google say that they have made the latest change because their research shows that people prefer to visit websites that load quickly. They also say in their central webmaster blog that the effect of a slow website can be cumulative: that is people remember their experience and are reluctant to repeat it.
I have to say that I agree with Google. If a web experience is poor I have to be pretty keen to persevere. I’m not the only one of course – your customers will be the same. In Google’s own words ‘faster sites create happy users’.
The good news is that Google have said that the most important criteria for search ranking is still the relevance of a page to a particular query.
If you want to test the speed of your website (or ours for that matter), you can do it here at WebPagetest.
Ursus Media produce usable, accessible, beautiful and, let’s be honest, pretty speedy websites and they’re all handcrafted here in sunny Swindon. Feel free to get in touch and if you’re in need of a new website take a look at our latest offer.
7 Reasons to blog for business
From a business point of view there are lots of good reasons to write a blog. The best business blogs give their readers a more personal perspective on sometimes impersonal corporations and allow them to engage in real dialogue with those in charge. A good blog can foster a loyal following of fans that will help you market your business in ways that would otherwise be impossible.
Here are 7 reasons to blog for your business:-
1. Become established as a thought leader in your industry.
This will appeal to customers who will visit your site or even subscribe to you as source of reliable knowledge and to potential customers who will see that you have your finger on the pulse and you understand what you’re talking about.
2. Foster a community.
You never know, you might end up engaging some of your competitors in conversation and find that you could work together. This happens a lot in creative industries; why should yours be any different?
3. Share knowledge.
Well why not? Educate and inform people and you’ll quickly find that they have a greater understanding of what you do. Take this article for example; after you’ve read this you’ll have a better understanding of blogging for business. If you ask us to build a website you’ll at least understand why you should consider adding a blog to it. If you do decide to write a blog you’ll have thought about what it needs to do for your business and maybe even have a content plan in place.
4. Court the search engines.
The search engines love websites that have lots of regularly updated, relevant content. If you blog little and often it will massively help your websites ranking on the likes of Google. If you link to other relevant sites and they link back to yours you’ll get even more of a boost.
5. It’s a ready-made PR channel.
Every so often you can insert a bit of exciting news about your company. The people that follow your blog and find it interesting will be pleased to hear the odd snippet of good news about you. We’ve just launched a special offer and moved offices and I’ve blogged about both. Now though we’re back to business – something useful for you. Don’t overdo the ‘news about us’ angle. It can backfire. Blogging is a type of social media so you give something to your readers and with a bit of luck they’ll give you something back maybe some free feedback or a community of eager testers.
6. Building relationships.
Let’s be honest, your website exists to help you sell. Your blog however is a forum where your main objective is not to sell. It can help you establish a more personal relationship with your customers some of whom will engage with you much more deeply and on a less formal footing. They’ll see your blog as a way to talk to you on a level playing field and you should embrace this. These people will be your most loyal supporters.
7. You might learn something.
Seek out information and write stories that interest you. Expand on them – maybe turn these stories into a series. You might learn something useful in the process and be able to add even more value to your company’s offering. Think about your readers and what you can give them.
I think these are all pretty good reasons to write a blog. If you can think of any more or even if you disagree with me (cough splutter), let me know.
