With studies in recent years having indicated that visitors to websites only hang around for a few seconds on average before departing, the message has surely never been clearer: genuinely effective and professional web design matters.
Above all else, your company website is supposed to aid your business’s sales goals and broader growth. If it does not do that, consider whether any or more of these 11 factors could be to blame.
- The colour scheme is poor
You can’t expect your target audience to stay around if the colours on your website clash, do not help to portray your business in a flattering light or otherwise fail to support your wider branding efforts – for example, if the colours differ from that on the rest of your promotional material.
- It is difficult to find
Just a few tweaks to your website’s SEO – such as giving it a search-friendly domain name, incorporating relevant keywords into pages and optimising the page titles – could make a great difference to your firm’s ability to attract the right people.
- There doesn’t seem to be any contact information
Either that, or the relevant details are all buried in a part of the site that seems far from logical. Even just introducing a ‘live chat’ function so that you can provide on-demand assistance to visitors could do a lot to transform your site’s effectiveness.
- Visitors are asked to sign up first
A lot of your potential customers who are presented with a mandatory signup form will simply click that browser ‘back’ button and flee, fearing that you’re about to start bombarding them with spam or that the effort required just isn’t worth it for what they’ll get from you. So, don’t bother.
- Loading times are slow
There’s little excuse for sites loading sluggishly in today’s age of ultra-professional web design that is specifically geared towards ensuring site visitors receive the information they need quickly. If it’s still a problem for your site, consider compressing the largest images and files.
- The site isn’t focused on your customers
For whom does your site exist – you, your colleagues or the people to whom you’re actually trying to sell? The answer is, of course, the latter. But your site may not even seem to be aimed at those people. At the very least, consider an FAQs page so that common visitor queries are in one place.
- Information is out of date
Don’t presume that visitors won’t notice you’ve barely updated your company blog over the last six months, or that the copyright date at the bottom of your homepage is 2013. Visitors are deterred by a site that seems to be outdated, so make sure you constantly introduce new and relevant content.
- There aren’t many reviews or testimonials
You can’t depend anymore on simply telling your target audience how great your products or services are, and them just believing you. These days, customers need to hear from third-party sources that your firm is worth the hype, and reviews and testimonials can help with exactly that.
- Autoplaying audio or video
In a professional web design space now largely free of JavaScript gimmicks, autoplaying video or audio might be the new chief annoyance. It’s something that’s definitely been overused, and you should at least give your visitors the ability to pause anything that lasts more than five seconds or so.
- It doesn’t display well on a smartphone
It seems that the proportion of Internet users who visit sites or shop via their smartphone or tablet is continually on the up, to the detriment of the percentage of those who only do so via desktop. Ensuring that your site is truly mobile-friendly has therefore never been more crucial.
- The visuals are low in quality
Is your site using free stock images that your visitors may have already seen a zillion times elsewhere? Maybe you’re still dependent on images taken on your phone, rather than by a professional photographer who knows how to avoid all of that notorious glare and graininess.
Don’t allow the standard of your company website to drop in any of the aforementioned respects, whatever your business’s size, sector or services. Get in touch with Futura now for a genuinely professional web design approach that will leave you with no regrets.