Newsletter #159 The 9 Most Common Website Mistakes

In 2013 your Website needs to be more than a brochure, it's core to your business.

So what are the nine common mistakes organisations (maybe like yours) are still making?

• Not putting enough resource into the site. For many companies there is a serious disconnect between how much your customers, existing and potential, rely on Websites like yours and how many resources you put into it. Surely your Web presence is worth at least half a salesperson per year? I bet you're not spending anywhere near that amount....
   
• No calls to action. What are the main actions you want visitors to take when they visit your site? Do you want them to buy things? Sign up to your newsletter? Fill out your contact form? Pick up the phone and ring you? Each page should have an obvious call to action that prompts visitors to take the next step along the path you want them to follow.
   
• Making font sizes too small. One trend we have noticed on the better new sites is that they reduce the amount of information and increase the text size significantly, particularly on their home page. Checkout https://www.mover.io/ and https://www.triggerapp.com/
  
   
• Not making your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) obvious. What is it that you do really and why are you different? Often it is quite hard to work out what an organisation does and it requires quite a bit of investigation to find out. It shouldn't be so....
  
   

• Structuring your site to mirror your organisational hierarchy - engineering and technical industries are especially bad at this. Nobody cares how your company is setup internally, they do care about who is behind it and what products and services you offer.
  
   
• Poor optimisation of content for mobiles - part I. The world has moved on and 20-30% or more of your visitors will be on mobile devices. They don't like  Flash animations (Apple devices don't even read them) and they don't like big bulky images or large hi-res PDFs. You can tweak your site to help mobile users very inexpensively without building a mobile version.
  
   
• Poor optimisation of content for mobiles part II. In our research we have found that a large proportion of mobile visitors are simply looking for your location and contact details. This is particularly relevant if you have a number of branches or offices. So make sure they can phone you direct from their mobile without typing and use a Google map if you have a location that customers visit - they may want to plot the route to your place via their mapping application.
  
   
• Not bothering to measure anything. As H. James Harrington said: 'If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.' All good hosting companies offer some sort of site statistics program so there is no excuse not to work out how many visitors your Website(s) have, how many you convert and how it fits in with your overall marketing plan.
  
   
• Not integrating, EVERYTHING. Most companies now have a social media presence of some sort, even if it is just a basic Facebook page or LinkedIn. The key is to use the content generated on these platforms to keep your site fresh. There are ways to do so so that updates are fully automated. Not only does this make your site look more alive, search engines will also index you more often as your content is changing.

Best wishes

Alex Garden