When your customer lands on your website how easy is it for them to understand what you do/sell/provide?
Web surfers are impatient, have the attention span of a gnat and finding an alternative that’s ‘easier’ is – easier – than struggling with anything that doesn’t deliver what they want fast.
Here are 10 things that will send your traffic running to your competition:
- Faded video in the background that takes up the whole of the first screen with no indication of what you do.
- Stop-start images visible anywhere there’s content – don’t distract your visitor from your message.
- No headline or ‘Welcome’ or ‘Home page’. You need a proper headline to engage your reader and get them to want to read more – on every page.
- Leaving it to the third or fourth screen before presenting your products or services.
- Scrolling marquees with text (e.g. testimonials) that move too fast for people to read all the text.
- Black backgrounds with light coloured text (e.g. Black/white, dark blue/pale blue, maroon/gold). It‘s much harder to read than dark text on a light background – and results in a big drop in comprehension – not good news for you.
- Justified text – that’s where all the lines are forced to be the same length. People often lose their place in the paragraph. Centred text isn’t great either, left-aligned is the easiest for people to process.
- Very wide paragraphs. Anything longer than 100 characters (including spaces) in 10-12 point gets uncomfortable for the reader as they have to move their head to scan from the end of one line back to the beginning of the next. They probably won’t realise it consciously, it just feels ‘wrong’.
- Light grey text on a white background – it needs to be at least 90% black.
- Too many things in one screen. Stick to 3-6 services on your home page, but don’t put testimonials on one side and other text in the middle or a video next to a sign up form (that can go underneath).
This may sound fussy – but anything that is a barrier between your message and your audience makes no sense at all – no matter how beautiful it may look!
