Halloween will soon be upon us, and it’ll be perfectly normal for a couple of nights to see witches, ghosts and monsters walking the streets of the world. In the world of the internet, though, we’re subjected to some monstrous horrors every single day of the year. Yes, we’re talking about horror websites. This week and next, we’ll show you 10 of the worst things you can do to your website. But for now, here’s 5…
- Frighteningly bad stock images. Seriously. No-one’s fooled. Nobody really thinks that woman with the gleaming white teeth with the phone pressed up against her ear actually works in your office, especially as she’s on five hundred other websites across the net. And no, we don’t want to see two men in suits with briefcases shaking hands. Behave yourself!
- Over-SEO’d zombie-like content. Yes, we know you know the basics of SEO. We also know SEO is important. But what we know and you don’t is that you can over-SEO a website to the point where it’s actually doing you harm. If a user can’t read your website properly because it’s loaded with keywords and weird over-SEO’d stuff, they’re going to go elsewhere. The search engines might love you (they probably won’t), but your potential customers will be leaving in their hordes.
- Information overkill. Your homepage should help the end user get what they want quickly. Give them the basics; don’t give them the life story of you and your company and every single service you perform. They need to know the basics and they need to know them quickly, else they’ll go to your competitor. After all, your competitor is only two clicks away. Keep them on your site instead!
- Mysterious navigation. Make your site easy to navigate, or users won’t bother trying. As above, your competitor’s website is only two clicks away, and the customer doesn’t care that you’re losing business. They want an easy life and to get the answers they’re looking for quickly, so help them out. Don’t use confusing jargon and industry-speak; keep it simple.
- Creaking loading times. We know it’s 2014 and that a large proportion of the country is on super-fast broadband, but that’s no excuse for extremely hi-def images on your homepage and massive great videos swamping the page real estate. It’s going to make loading times much longer than they need to be, especially for users on mobile internet who are looking for something quickly. Again, it goes back to making the experience easy for the customer, as otherwise they’ll go elsewhere!
Of course, none of this should apply to you. If it does, you’ll need to get it sorted out and pretty quickly, so your website doesn’t become another Halloween horror. More next week…
