HOW TO AVOID THE MOST COMMON WEB SITE MISTAKES

Always Be Thinking About Your Visitors and Their Needs First

by Joelle Steele

I wrote this article to provide you with some tips for repairing or eliminating potential problems on the Web site you are creating or on your existing site. I launched my first Web site in 1994, currently have three active Web sites up and running, and I have spent the last 14 years surfing the World Wide Web. In preparation for writing this article, I researched a variety of studies in which people visited Web sites and were asked to rate the various Web sites and their individual features. Then, I spent countless hours visiting and evaluating about 800 Web sites built to serve a number of different kinds of visitors. In addition, I read up on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and their various Web standards to make Web sites appear more uniformly among all the various browsers and viewing devices in use today. Boy, am I tired!

Well, in the end, I felt pretty well-educated and enlightened, and I saw some truly gorgeous Web sites during my evaluation. Some had beautiful images, great writing, terrific navigation, and were in every way well-executed from start to finish. Unfortunately, at least 50% of the Web sites I visited had some very serious problems, errors, and omissions. It seems to me that the very first thing we need to remember at all times is why we have a Web site in the first place: To get more business! To do this, our Web sites must cater to the needs of our visitors by providing them with enough easy-to-find information that they can decide if we are credible resources and if they should buy our products or services. To make that happen, we must always be thinking about the visitors and their needs before anything else.

Your Web site may be written by you, but it is written for them.

NAVIGATION LINKS

This is a huge problem -- navigation button links in three different places -- sometimes even in different places on each page. Some button links on one page that aren't there on another page. This is poor design, plain and simple. Studies show that if your visitors can't find what they're looking for, they will simply leave and look elsewhere. Put all your navigation buttons in ONE PLACE where EVERYONE can find them, and put them in that same place on every single page. If you have sub-webs, put global navigation links at the bottom of each page too. I actually visited Web sites that had only three working navigation buttons and two that were missing altogether. I could not believe how many had links that were "dead" or "bad" or went to the wrong page. And let's not forget the design of your navigation buttons. Don't make your visitor have to "float" or "hover" over an unmarked and/or not-so-obvious navigation button or graphic in order to find their way around -- or to find the buttons at all. You're providing information, not creating a puzzle for visitors to solve. Make it easy for them to find what they want and need.

CONTACT INFO

This was probably the single biggest problem I saw. Next to your home page, the contact page is the single most important page on your Web site. I cannot emphasize this enough. The whole purpose of a Web site is to have people contact you, and yet more than one-third of all the Web sites I visited did not have contact pages at all. Instead, the contact information was "buried" throughout the site or was simply incomplete once found. I actually saw numerous Web sites with no contact information at all -- no address, no phone, no E-mail -- nothing! Not much chance of getting any business that way. And with regard to E-mail addresses, remember, you are on the Web where E-mail is the preferred form of communication. Don't make your visitors fill out a form, especially not the overly long ones I saw again and again. Studies show most people will not fill them out. So, if you do have a form, give your visitors the option of either filling it out or using a direct link to your E-mail instead. Most visitors want a record of who they contacted, and forms rarely send them a copy for their records. And, for the record, answer your E-mail every single day. You will lose a lot of business if you don't.

As for spam worries, it's just cyber junk mail that you can easily spot and delete with a simple click. You don't even have to open it. I have my E-mail address all over my Web sites, and I doubt if I get more than about ten pieces of spam in a month. That's because spam is mainly a result of you or one of your employees or family members using your E-mail address as a form of contact when they sign up to receive a free prize, enroll in a dating service, take a survey, or buy something at a Web site that collects E-mail addresses and then shares them with everyone in the known universe.

WRITING

The World Wide Web is completely driven by words, not images. Put the bulk of your work into the language you use and what you are really saying, then decorate the pages with your images. Write in plain, simple language. Your visitors are looking for information that will tell them if you offer the products or services they want. Make it crystal clear to them exactly what it is that you do. State this clearly in the first sentence on the page -- especially your Home page. Make your titles and subheadings clearly state what your page or article is about. So many pages I read were nothing but overblown "puff pieces" that didn't "say" anything useful about the products or services, but were just a lot of long-winded nonsense -- writers showing off their ability to use words and their inability to communicate with them. Also, it's okay to write long articles within your Web site, but keep your Home page as brief and concise as possible. Also be sure that it says where you do business and what you do.

READABILITY

Wow! What a mess! My eyes will never be the same again. The prescription in my eyeglasses is up-to-date, but you would never know it from reading about half of these Web sites. Talk about tiny print and hard-to-read fonts! I had to lean in less than 12" from the monitor to read a lot of these sites. It's true that smaller typefaces get read more carefully than do overly large ones, but if you're going under 10 pt type for your basic text, you are really stretching it as far as readability is concerned. Add the size of the text to the fact that it is so often placed against a background that makes it even harder to read. Remember that someone has to read that pale green text you decided to place on top of a blue patterned background. Just because you think it's pretty and you can read it doesn't mean that they can read it. Studies indicate that people read longer (stay on the page longer) when the text is dark and the background is light and free of patterns. Preview your Web pages at different screen resolutions in different browsers and on different computers and cell phones to make sure your Web site is fully readable by all your visitors.

PHOTOS & IMAGES

Your logo is important to your visitors and so are photos of your projects or products -- and of you and your employees. Use pictures of real products and real people, not stock photos of models. Let everyone know in advance that their photo is being taken so that they can look their best. If someone takes a bad photo, don't use it. Try again. If they just look too unpleasant or unapproachable, don't use their photo at all. Make sure your images are not all blurry because they are low resolution and you or your Webmaster enlarged them beyond the limits of clarity. And make sure your photos and images are really there. I saw tons of Web sites that had missing photos or graphics, many right on the Home page. The average small business Web site is less than 20 pages, so it doesn't take that long to go online and look at each of those pages to make sure that all the images appear correctly and fix any that don't. And if you have a product to sell, make sure that its image is large enough for the visitor to get a true idea of what it looks like. Put up different views of it, if necessary. If you opt to hyperlink a thumbnail image to an enlarged image, make that enlarged image at least half the screen size, and be sure it is crystal clear in all its details.

ADS, GRAPHICS, AND ANIMATION

Please, keep these to a minimum, or at least organize any ads or logos you are hosting so that they don't interfere with reading your content. Studies show that visitors perceive a lot of ads and logos randomly placed as distracting, and they do make your Web site look overly busy and junky. And, as for animation, most of it is just incredibly annoying. The same is true of special effects like "fading" or "dissolving" the page as you move from one page to another. You know, just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to do it. People visit your web pages to see your work and to read about who you are and what you do. Make it easy and fast for them to find what they want and need with a minimal amount of unnecessary distraction.

TOO MANY CLICKS TO NOWHERE

I don't know about you, but I don't have time to keep clicking away, not even knowing if I am ultimately going to get to what I really want. I found so many Web sites -- mainly the larger ones -- where it took me up to six clicks to get to a page that was not even remotely close to what I wanted or expected to find, or that was what I wanted but did not contain anywhere near enough of the information I was seeking. There is no reason to force a visitor to click to one tiny little piece of text, that links to another tiny little piece of text, that links to yet one more tiny piece of text, and on and on and on. Just put it all on the same page. You're making work for yourself, making more work and paying more to your Webmaster for unnecessary pages, and in the end your visitor does not benefit from it at all.

SPLASH SCREENS & LOADING SCREENS

These are my single biggest pet peeve when it comes to Web site design. If you want to present a pretty video, make it an option for someone to select and view, not a requirement before they can even get into your site. The "loading, please wait" screens are a waste of your visitor's valuable time, and the splash screens, especially the animated ones, are nothing more than a showcase for the graphic capabilities of the Webmaster, but they serve no purpose other than to delay getting to the information on the home page, especially when the "skip intro" option doesn't even load until the animation is almost over. Introductory splash screens and videos can also prevent your Web site from being crawled properly by many search engines if your page is not coded properly, and these pages often load very slowly, even on cable modem. I can't begin to imagine how slow they must be on dial-up! In addition, while it may seem obvious to you and your Webmaster that the visitor needs to click on an image to get into your Web site, there are always a lot of people who are new to browsing the Web, and it is a simple courtesy to them to offer a "click here to enter" link if you insist on wasting your time creating these pages.

MUSIC & SOUND EFFECTS

This is pretty much the same problem I have with animated figures dancing across the screen, except that the music can be even more annoying, and sometimes you can't escape it at all because it is on every page. I love music -- have a huge music collection and even used to own a recording studio -- but it is about the last thing I want to be subjected to when I'm visiting a Web site. Studies show I'm definitely not the only one who feels this way. What if a visitor doesn't share your taste in music? Maybe they don't like New Age or classical music. Maybe they don't like that old time rock 'n' roll. Maybe the ongoing sounds of waves hitting the shore or windchimes tinkling are perceived as distracting to a visitor. Maybe that visitor would have stayed and made a purchase if they had not been so turned off by your sounds. Again, if you insist on using these kinds of effects, at least give the visitor a very clear and visible means of turning them off.

HYPERLINKS

These links to other pages in your own Web site or to other Web sites must be kept updated if you are going to put them on a page at all. You should check them at least once a month. It is amazing how many people take their Web sites down after only a short period of time, and when a visitor clicks on one of those dead links, and then the next one is also a dead link, it starts to look like you just don't care. Can you see your credibility dropping? Also, as a general rule of thumb, make sure that all your links show up in a different color when they have been followed. This helps the visitor know where they've been so that they don't end up clicking on that same link again.

POP-UPS

Yeah, you know what these are. That's why they have Pop-Up blockers. What is worse than having one pop-up ad after another? Nothing. And now, many people make their own pop-up pages that don't have a BACK button, so you have to "x" out of them to get back to wherever you were. Avoid pop-ups at all cost. Studies show they are rarely even looked at because the visitor just gets irritated at the interruption and hits the "x" to make them go away.

WRONG TITLE, WRONG PAGE, PAGE NOT FOUND

You've probably experienced these at least a few dozen times. You type some keywords into your search engine, the list comes up, you see a title that is just what you're looking for, you click on it, and it's an entirely different subject or you get a 404 Page Not Found Error message. To avoid having this happen to your visitors you must do three things. First, always delete old pages from the server when you delete them on your own computer. Second, if you replace text with new text, change the page title meta tag in the HTML code so that it matches your new content. Three, use a custom error page so that instead of the 404 Page Not Found Error message, your visitor will instead be directed to one of your own Web pages, complete with its navigation buttons and an error message that you write that redirects them to the information they were seeking.

Web sites are one of the best forms of advertising to come along in years. But they are a lot more complex than a simple magazine or newspaper ad. So keep all of the above mistakes off your Web site and always think of your visitor first. You can't go wrong!