The Top 6 Reasons Why Your Website Won't Make The Grade
1 – Time is Precious – From the minute someone clicks on the link for your website, you have roughly 8 seconds for your site to load fully or you will risk losing the customer for good. In an age of high speed broadband, if a site takes any longer than this to load, a user will invariably come to the conclusion that the website is faulty.
2 – Excessive Use of Adverts – Nothing puts a user of a website more than being bombarded with sponsored links and adverts completely unrelated to the website they are browsing. An over-reliance on adverts makes a website look cluttered and unprofessional and will, more often than not, compel a potential customer to take their business elsewhere.
3 – Flight of The Navigator – A website user wants their experience on a website to be an intuitive one and they want to be able to navigate around a site with no stumbling blocks. If you make a user work too hard to find what they are looking for on your site, they won't persevere, they will simply give up and take their custom to a company with a more user friendly website.
4 – Hidden Contact Details – A website needs to promote trust in a user and by making contact details such as telephone numbers and emails nigh-on impossible to find, you will be having the exact opposite effect. If a customer needs to contact you but can't find the means by which to do so, they will take their custom to a website that is less backward in coming forward with their contact details.
5 – Pop Ups – When landing on a website, a user will be interested in looking around the website (that's why they clicked the link in the first place). What they will not be interested in is an attack of pop up ads that invariably infuriate users beyond belief. The prevalence of pop-up blockers would suggest that users abhor this method of advertising but, alas, they are still widespread on the internet.
6 – Music – Most people who surf the internet don't want a website to play music as it is invariably of the screeching and annoying variety and is merely a nuisance. Also, people often are already listing to their own music when surfing and don't want this interrupted by website jingles.
So, what is clear is that if you're using your website as a selling tool or as the ‘face' of your business, it needs to be of a sufficiently high standard to ensure users warm to it immediately. This is why most companies employ the expertise of specialist web designers to formulate their sites and SEO experts to ensure it is optimised in the rankings.