Five Reasons Why People Hate Your Business Website
Small business websites have a reputation of generally being bad. It’s not our fault, web trends keep changing and we’re too busy growing our business to worry about our website.
The truth is that as your website becomes more and more important (people look for you online before searching anywhere else), making sure you are giving users a positive experience becomes more important too.
Creating a positive experience can be simple; most times the simpler the better, small businesses tend to get in trouble when they try to make things overly elaborate.
Here are five things you want to make sure your website doesn’t have, these are major obstacles that the average web user hates.
Autoplay Music or Video
There’s nothing more embarrassing than browsing the web, only to open a website that suddenly blasts music.
Autoplay music is the equivalent of forcing every new customer in your store to take part in an impromptu flash mob.
Don’t focus on ambiance on your website. Let your imagery and design portray your business and what it does; if you need music or an autoplay video, your website design needs help first.
Welcome Page
One underlying rule of the Internet is that it should be fast. The goal is to get people to the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
That’s why things like “welcome pages” are a major mistake. They create an unnecessary obstacle to the content the user wants and is looking for.
You gain nothing by forcing the user to click an arbitrary link bringing them to the actual page.
In the advertising world, these pages are called “hyperstitials“. Why would you want to put an unnecessary ad up in between your website and the user?
Missing Important Content
Most web users are “researchers”; they’re looking for something in particular.
Your website should cater to these researchers and make it as easy as possible to find the information they need to make a decision. In the instance of your business website, you want to give them all the information they need to choose you.
It’s imperative that your website have contact information, your hours, who you are, what you do, and other basic information. You should make this front and center; highlighting it since a majority of your website visitors will most likely be looking for this information.
Focusing on Unimportant Content
While you focus on content you know users will be looking for; don’t begin adding information that isn’t important. Unless your story is a reason why someone would choose your business, don’t highlight this over your contact information.
You can, and should, have supporting content on your website, but it shouldn’t be the most important information on the page. It should be displayed as supporting content, possibly on a secondary page instead of on the home page.
Illegible Design
Finally, if you’re spending all this time putting together great content and designing a website that shows visitors what they want, make sure your designs make it easy to read and consume.
Use large headlines, legible fonts ( we use a font size of 15px ), and most importantly a color scheme that is easy on the eyes. We tend to recommend our clients use a light and inviting background color, with a dark font; to stay away from and not use the inverted dark background and light font.
You can use this tool to figure out if your text is legible. If it isn’t, the tool will recommend a color scheme to help make it easier to read.
The easier it is for people to read your content, the quicker they can scan it and make a decision.
Next Steps…
Web users are impatient; if you don’t give them the content they want in a design that is easy to consume, most users will leave your website.
Take the time to audit your website and make sure you’re not using an outdated trend that is turning away users.
Lastly, look at your web analytics to ensure that people that visit your website are actually staying and reading the content.
You want to know if people spending time on your website. Are they finding what they want? Are they contacting you and choosing your business?
What bothers you about business websites? Have a success story about how you turned around your website? Share it with the group so we can all learn.
