Common Website Mistakes for Small Businesses
You only get once chance to make a good first impression. As a business owner, you take careful steps to provide excellent customer service within your establishment – so why should your website be any different? More and more, customers are taking their business online. Even customers who intend to visit the actual location to make their final purchase will go online before going in. Don’t let easily preventable website mistakes get in the way of you making a sale.
Evolution Brands understands the importance of having a strong web presence, so here is our list of common website missteps that you need to watch out for.
1. Having A Poor Background
Does your webpage background look like a Myspace profile? A background should be subtle, aesthetically appealing, and well-thought-out. Avoid using a stretched out or pixelated photo. Not only will the warped photo look low quality, but any text will be hard to read as well. An equally bad background is the repetition of a single small photo (just because the photo is small and properly scaled doesn’t make it look any less unprofessional). When signing on to your website, your business and what you do should be front and center – don’t let a distracting background take away from that.
2. Going Overboard with Information
The landing page of your website should include all of the essential knowledge that the customer needs, but it shouldn’t go overboard. The pages of your website should be like artisan crafted ice cream – with each ingredient carefully selected to compliment the dessert as a whole. Sometimes, amateur web designers will create pages more akin to an ice cream made by a third grader at a build-your-own-sundae bar. All of the ingredients might be great individually but, if you mash them all together in one bowl, it’s not going to look very appealing.
3. Skimping on Quality
You’ve spent countless hours and your hard-earned money to make your place of business look polished and perfect, so why wouldn’t you apply that same attention-to-detail to your website? A cheap looking logo or other low quality photos can take an otherwise nice website and make it look dated and unprofessional. By spending a little extra upfront for a well-designed logo and engaging photos, you’ll be much more likely to retain customers and increase your ROI.
4. Not Being Mobile-Friendly
In this day and age, most customers aren’t even logging on to their laptops or desktops to buy products or check out new businesses – they’re doing it all from their phones. Even if you have the most beautiful and well-crafted website, if it doesn’t hold up on phones or tablets, then you could be losing potential sales. Make sure that your website is as user-friendly on mobile as it is from your desktop.
5. Making Your Page a Maze
Few things will cause customers to click the back arrow faster than a site that is impossible to navigate. Menus that are hard to find or, even worse, contain dead links will complicate the process for users and could drive them away from your business. Your website should be, above all things, user-friendly. If your website could be a challenge on the game show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, then you should probably think about simplifying things.
6. Not Conveying Your Message Clearly & Concisely
The whole point of a website is to educate customers about your brand and potentially sell your product or service. Unfortunately, if no one can tell what your site is selling, then it’s essentially useless. While it’s important to have an aesthetically pleasing website, don’t forget that the most important thing is that your website clearly and concisely conveys who you are and what you do.
A website is a powerful tool and could be the difference between making or losing a sale. If you’re not sure where to get started with designing or redesigning your site, call Evolution Brands at 239.789.1992 and we’ll help you create the website of your dreams.