Gone are the days when you used to list you business on yellow pages and wait for customers to walk in. A well developed website is the most important branding weapon you have in your armory, since it acts as the pivot for your sales and marketing efforts.
The main aim for developing a website is to attract a target audience rather than repelling them away by spreading information poorly. A site is the extension of the physical location of your organization so it should provide extensive information about you both on a personal or professional level.
When in the process of crafting a website you need to acquaint yourself with these hidden landmines to avoid design features that can diminish the success of your site. They include;
1· Website Text- these features can diminish credibility and fail to inspire confidence in your readers due to grammar and spelling errors, lack of visual cleanliness due to use of many fonts, small text that are invisible, all caps paragraphs, colored texts that are not links, busy backgrounds, large chunks of text and an outdated site.
2· Poor Site Navigation– a confusing navigation is one of the most egregious offenses due to links that are not descriptive in their title, not easily identifiable and are not functioning properly.
Broken links and error pages make a site look un-maintained and messy creating a huge hassle for your visitors. Links and buttons should be visually unified to ensure scanning of the webpage back to the homepage and connecting to other sections.
Useless page titles that do not explain what the page is about can be frustrating. Non-intuitive site navigation makes it difficult for search engines to crawl a website thereby impacting on its rankings.
3· Lack of Google Maps– embedding Google maps to your sites will help customers get directions as they are always on the move. Absence of a map on your site can guarantee lack of a customer’s good will and also poor ranking of your business in the Google plus local business listings. Google amps helps visitors to actually visit your physical store to buy products or services.
4· Website Junk and Clutter– offering a wide range of unnecessary features can be overwhelming to the visitors making it hard for them to find what they are looking for i.e. automatic video and audios when the page opens, page review counters, meaningless awards mentioned on every page, texts that flash and blink and excessive amounts of adverts.
A simple and attractive site will generate a positive impression on visitors and make them stay longer.
5· Leaving Out Essential Information– when your key information and details are buried it can be disastrous for a business, As it makes the site to feel cumbersome, difficult and tiring to use since the user will have to scroll around the page the find them.
Information such as business location, products, descriptions, prices, contact and opening hours should be provided to ensure a business meets its expectations especially for online shops.
6· Images– images that are really large than the users screen, lack alt signs and have a large thumbnail can cause your site to load much slower than expected which might be annoying to the user. Using properly optimized images after compression can improve a sites speed. Along with that images should be added with alt tags to help search engine crawlers to crawl the images and ensure their relevancy for a particular page or post.
7· Outdated Technology– the brand image and functionality of a business is highly dependent on the technology used when designing the site. Use the latest technology to ensure that your site is compatible with all kind of browsers and mobile devices to strengthen image and impress your customers.
8· Topography– using a wrong topography that does not reflect the brands personality will deliver the wrong message to the visitors. Use a web page font that fits the business brand image.
9· Lack of an SEO Strategy– a site that is not optimized for Google and search engines cannot be easily indexed leading to poor traffic and no leads.
Avoid the above stumbling blocks and you will be on your way to creating a visually memorable, fully functioning, and successful user friendly website and hire a best
website designing company in Gurgaon.