I usually try to be positive on my blogs. But I’m going to make an exception this week.
Have you ever worn something and had a friend, spouse or child tell you, “you shouldn’t be caught dead in that!”?
As my sons mature (used loosely) into teenagers, they (like all teenagers) feel that they’re experts in a lot of things. Like fashion and the ways of the world. It’s my life right now. It’s fun to think how much they’re like me when I was their age.
We have a lot of companies who ask us to “look at” their websites and let them know what we’d change. We try to be positive in the response; but internally we often look at the site in a negative way (to begin with).
Here are the 3 things that stand out to us as a cautionary tale. The “you shouldn’t be caught dead with” things for a website.
- Too much content. The average person spends about 10 seconds per page. And it takes about 3 seconds on your homepage to determine if they’ll continue into your site or not. Most organizations have FAR too much content on a page. This is often because they don’t know how to edit, don’t know how to set priority, and don’t know the proper placement of content.
- Your Mission Statement. This is like KFC posting their secret spices on their websites. A Mission/Vision statement is an internal document of how you conduct business. It’s not intended for the “outside” world. Instead, it should be the catalyst for everything on your website. Often for an organization that posts their statement, it notifies us that they’re not thinking of the customer, instead, they’re thinking of themselves.
- Too many pictures. This sounds crazy, but for Search Engine Optimization, it’s imperative to have words for the “spiders” to search and tag you. Websites that are full of pictures and lacking captions will never climb the rungs of the Google engines. Also check to see if your graphics are mainly pictures too. It’s the “old way” of making sure that the fonts looked right on screen. You need to use selectable text not pictures, not a lot of flash, and limit uncatalogue-able animated gifs.
Eliminate these things and your website will instantly improve. Need help with setting priorities or editing? We’d love to help. Just let me know!
