Designing a website for your business or re-designing an existing one is never easy. It's always difficult to choose the right company to build your website. We'd be delighted to help you in this process, but if you are working with another company or building your website yourself, here are some helpful tips to avoid common mistakes that can scare away clients who find you through your website.

1. Splash Pages or Flash Intros

Why It's Bad: Today's web browser wants the information they are looking for, as fast as possible. You have less than 10 seconds to capture a visitor's attention before they'll leave and surf off to the next site. A splash page or flash intro just delays a user from reaching the main page of your site (which should contain your most important marketing message that your customers need to know about). If you really want to implement a flash intro into your website, place it on the home page in addition to the text that conveys your marketing message, or on a page inside your website. This way your visitor isn't delayed in reaching the main page of your site that contains your marketing message.

2. Not Using Your Home Page Properly

Why It's Bad: A website can sometimes be a potential client's first contact with your company. If the main page of your site isn't set up properly, then contact may never go beyond the first visit to your site. Obviously this is a bad thing! The first page a visitor sees on your site needs to contain your marketing message: Basically what you do, and why they should hire you instead of another company. This information, as well as links to other important information about your business that a customer will be interested in (photos, testimonials etc.) needs to be displayed above the fold (a fancy term that means displayed without scrolling down) in a manner that is simple and not confusing. This ensures that visitors can find all the information they need about your company from your website, and increases the chance they will contact you and become a client.

3. Inconsistent Navigation

Why It's Bad: Have you ever been to a website that had shifting navigation? You'd visit one page and the navigation would change to suit that section of the website. Didn't that drive you nuts? If it bothers you, it will most likely bother the visitors of your website as well! All the navigation to every section of your site needs to be on every page. This will avoid frustrating your visitors, because a visitor that becomes frustrated with navigating your site is more likely to close the browser window than become a client.

4. Using Tables for Layout

Why It's Bad: This is a more technical aspect that is hard for a non-technical individual to detect. However when hiring a web design company, you should ensure that their web design is done in pure CSS (new), and not with Tables (old). CSS allows you to control the look of a site across all browsers, something that is difficult to do with tables. It also has many features that allow CSS pages to load much faster than a page built with tables. Remember, you have less than 10 seconds to capture a visitor's attention, and if you use 2 seconds to load your page, then you have wasted precious time! Fast loading times are important.

5. Putting Text in Images or Flash

Why It's Bad: Not only is there a significantly higher load time for images or flash versus text (which causes your page to load slower), but search engines cannot read text in Flash or Images. If they can't read the text on your site, then they can't rank you for search terms related to your webpage. So it is important to keep your text as plain text and not images or graphics as much as possible.

Hopefully you find these tips helpful the next time you design a new, or redevelop an existing, website. Remember! We always provide free quotes, so contact us today!