Your website is often the first contact a prospect has with your business. A well-designed and informative website is essential for any small business owner. As a marketing professional and web designer, I inherently evaluate every website that I visit. Because small business owners are my target market, I’m constantly looking at websites. It is very clear that many of these businesses either do not have the available resources or do not have a good understanding of the importance of a well build website. Either way, many have dropped the ball regarding their web presence. Here are the top fivemistakes I see small business owners make that can cause visitors to abandon the site.
- No Contact Information – When a visitor comes to your site they should be able to locate your contact information within 3 seconds. The most consistent (and obvious) place to display your contact information is in the footer of your website. In addition, having a contact, us page or about us page placed prominently in your navigation will allow visitors to easily reach you. It is also advantageous to place your contact information directly on the pages where visitors are most likely to be moved to make a purchase. These include your services and testimonials pages.
- Unnecessary Landing Page – Many business owners opt to have a splash introduction page before visitors are taken directly to the site. Although I personally dislike them, a splash page that has purpose can be beneficial and entice the visitor to look further. However, when the splash page has no purpose, (i.e. it just says “Click here to enter the site”); plain and simple, it should not exist. So if you just to use a splash or intro page use it to display a photo slideshow, compelling facts or statistics, testimonials, or other key content that will make your visitors eager to enter your site.
- Music with No “Off” Button – Music on a website can be a pleasurable enhancement on some websites; far too often business owners overuse music, select the wrong playlist, or set the volume too loudly. But beyond these melodic mistakes the biggest is hiding or not giving visitors the option to disable the music. The disable or “off” button should be easy to find and should disable the sound for the duration of the visit to your site. If a visitor does not wish to hear the audio on your site and is unable to disable it they are likely to abandon the site and look elsewhere.
- Incomplete Information – I recently visited a website that had a 6-tab navigation, of those six tabs three of them took me to “Coming Soon” pages. If your website is incomplete, your business appears to be disorganized and unprofessional. It is ok to use coming soon pages sparingly when you want to let visitors know that new information is on the way but too many blank or coming soon pages is a poor reflection on your business.
- Flash Websites – Not all flash websites are bad; in fact, flash used properly can create a very professional and lively website. The problem is many small business owners get carried away with the flash features and animations. As site with multiple things moving, bouncing, and flashing is extremely distracting and prohibits a site visitor from really focusing on the content. In addition, a full flash site puts you at a disadvantage regarding Search Engine Optimization because flash is not indexed by search spiders like traditional HTML websites. If, you choose to use a full flash site here are 5 Steps for Building a SEO-Friendly Flash Site from TheCosmonaut that will help to improve SEO results.
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