6 Ways To Improve Your Website

February 20, 2009 · Filed Under Site Improvement

Here are SIX simple ways that you can use to improve your site’s performance…

1. Do NOT hide your products/services behind a fancy “landing” page full of graphics and animations. Visitors get NO sense of what your site is about, or whether it can help them! And that’s a BIG problem, because a typical first-time visitor to any site is only going to invest a few seconds trying to decide if your site is relevant or not… and if you put a roadblock like a splash landing page in front of them that doesn’t even identify what the site is called, they’ll often not bother exploring beyond it! I’m all for using attractive images, nice videos, and appealing graphics on your website, but only when they’re used appropriately, and NOT at the expense of your sales!

2. Make sure your site design clearly reflects your business or product Again, remember that your first-time visitors are looking for clues that will reassure them — right away — that they’re in the right place. If, even at first glance, they feel they’ve landed on a site that isn’t offering the information they need, they’ll often just leave again, rather than spend the time exploring further to see if it’s relevant or not. For example, I was searching for a new headset with a built-in microphone. I hit on a site that the landing (splash) page header graphic was cherubs and pink hearts. Maybe it was setup for a Valantine’s Day special. I scrolled down the page past the fold and all I saw was greeting card prose. I didn’t stay on the site to find out if there actually were headsets. DO NOT let your emotions dictate your site design. If your site is for marketing, then get your message out there first and clear.

3. Keep your navigation menu simple A navigation menu that’s clear and easy to follow is one of the key elements of any successful website. One of the questions that comes up regularly from my clients is “How many navigation buttons/links is too many?” I have to admit, I don’t know. I think it depends on how many categories of products/services your site includes and how many pages there are. A site with 1500 pages is naturally going to have more navigation links than a site with 150 pages. Here’s what I do know… If one of the first things you ask your visitor to do is decide what they want to do first from among 35 different options, they’ll often become confused or flustered, and do the one thing that’s really easy: leave the site. Navigation bars positioned on the right or left side of the page should be constrained to above the fold, if possible. Try and group similar topics under one navigation button with popup or drop-down sub-menus. All menu labels should be real clear, and explicitly state what’s behind each choice. You never want a visitor to end up on a page that is not what they want. They are immediately flustrated and leave. Remember, site visitors don’t want to have to think about what they’re doing. They should be able to smoothly and seamlessly move around your site with NO surprises and NO mistakes, and clear navigation menus are the best way to make that happen.

QPA Training Website

4. TELL your visitors what your site is about, who it’s for, and what makes it different I see this all the time: web sites whose first crucial lines of content are “Welcome to my site!” That welcoming approach may work for a brick-and-mortar store, but when it comes to a website, you’ve got MUCH more important work to do at the top of your homepage. Remember… the clock is ticking! Your visitor is only spending a few seconds, MAYBE 15, looking for relevance, so don’t waste your time with greetings that do nothing to tell the visitor what you’re about. Get to the POINT! * What is the main benefit of this site (in other words, what will people gain by sticking around)? * Who is this site for? Who will benefit from using it? * What is unique or different about what you offer? In other words, what can I get from you that I won’t get from other sites that offer similar products/services? This referred to as your unique selling proposition or USP. By addressing all of these questions, your visitors will know at a glance that they’ve come to the right place, and stick around to explore. And answering ALL of these questions right up front is really easy. You just need a nice big, benefit-rich headline right at the top of your homepage, that gives all of this information. Get rid of the “Home” or “Home Page” label in your header space and meta data. Here’s an example of a good landing (index) page for a service-oriented business. Look at the site label at the very top of your browser above the menu bar. It doesn’t say “Home” or “Index”. It tells you what the site is about. Then look at the content on the page. The message is clearly stated and repeated so there is no doubt in your mind what this company offers and does. Their USP is given in the first paragraph; Longevity (21 years) and experience (thousands of companies and tens-of-thousands of students).

5. Make sure your copy is scannable Here’s a sad fact about the copy that site owners work so hard to create: most people won’t read it! And they likely won’t read YOURS, either… Well, at least they won’t read it word for word. The typical website visitor is an impatient person, and will likely just scan your homepage, looking for clues that will help them understand what the site is about. Let’s look again at the site from point 4 above. Did you notice the sub-headlines highlighted in blue with white text? They standout, they are short and to the point. Very scannable. Make sure you break your text into bite-size chunks, and include lots of sub-heads, bulleted list, and white space, in order to help guide your visitors’ eye to the most important ideas on the homepage. It also doesn’t hurt to add a bit of emphasis. Bold text the occasional word or phrase that expresses a key benefit will draw the eye right to that spot. Make your page easier to scan simply by reducing how wide the copy is. When text runs all the way across the website from left to right, it’s more than the human eye can absorb at a glance. The copy on the quality training site we looked at earlier is probably at a maximum width to remain easily readable. It appears to be between 640 pixels and 650 pixels. I definitely recommend restricting page copy to no more than 650 pixels wide.

6. Make it EASY for your visitors to contact you for more information If want to increase the number of visitors who contact you for more information about your services, you’ll want to make it easy for them to get in touch with you. For EACH additional click you ask your visitors to make, you risk losing up to 50% of them! So instead of burying a “contact us” button in the main navigation menu, I suggest you include a contact form right on the home page that people can fill in to request more information. This is a problem I had with the web site on quality training. The link to contact them is near the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar and it’s labeled “Help Desk”. I clicked that button and sure enough it’s their “contact us” page. So, I contacted them and commented that the “Help Desk” label was confusing and why not label it “Contact Us”? And, they have a pretty good explanation. The button was originally labeled with “Contact Us” and the page title was the same. Because this site receives a lot of visitors with a site ranking of PR 3 and some pages with PR 7 or higher, and over 200 inbound links they were getting hundreds of robot created spam messages everyday. They changed the navigation label and it helped some. Finally, they had to change the page title to gibberish and that put an end to the spam. There’s a lesson to be learned from that. If you open their “Help Desk” page and look at the URL in your browser’s address bar you’ll see the page title is random letters (gibberish).

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