Common Mistakes for Web Sites

Hard to Navigate: Many of the small business web sites I've seen are down right difficult to find your way through the site. A user is only going to give you so much time to find what they want, and then they're going to give up and look elsewhere. Have a clear and easy way to navigate around your site.

Domain Name Blues: To find a short domain name is hard to do. Almost all of the 3 letter domain names have been taken, and I'm sure there are a high percentage of the 4 letter words gone too. But many businesses pick domain names that have little to do with their business name or they host at a free site (i.e.: www.geocities.com/yourbizname). Users will try to find your site by typing in your business name or the initials of the name. Use of any other domain name runs the risk of loosing them. Then on opposite side of the coin, many company names are far too long. People might remember the name, but it becomes a pain to type it in or ! to send e-mails to you. For example, we used to have www.avaloninnovations.com as our main domain name. People could remember it because it's the name of the company, but do you know what a hassle it was spelling it out every time I gave someone my e-mail address over the phone? We later switched to a shortened www.avalonteam.com. Any domain name shorter was already taken. It often a good idea to have more than one domain name pointing toward your site. We moved www.avalonteam.com to be the primary address of our site, but the old avaloninnovations.com still points to the same site. In fact, we can configure e-mail sent to the other address to automatically forward.

Too Busy: Many sites try to put just too much stuff on the page. They have images, pictures, banner ads, text, flashing things and howzewhatsits all over the place. Some can actually be painful to look at! Especially for a business web site, the old adage keep it simple stupid really fits. This also helps to make a site easier to navigate. Now there's a fine line between clean and boring, but we can help you with that. You also have to look at who your users are, what age group do they fall into. The younger they are, the more open they are to fancier sites and navigation. They're also more likely to have newer computers and more updated software and operating systems. If my 69 year old father went to a web site that asked him to install a new Flash plug-in, he'd just leave the site.

Slow Sites: It's so easy to forget that not everyone in the world has a cable modem or a DSL line in their house. For those modem users still around, some sites take just too long to load. They're going to give up and leave. Anything more than around 15 seconds and people start looking at their watches. Get above 30 seconds and you should just forget about them! This is another area that you need to know the demographics of your site's users. If you cater only to a younger group, you my not be as concerned if you loose some visitors. But if you don't know or if they ! could be across the whole spectrum, then you might want to take load time into consideration.

Pictures Say A Thousand Words: Visitors to your site want to see picture of what you're selling. Good pictures at that too! I hate sites where I'm looking at buying something and there's no picture of the product or the picture is so dark and fuzzy that you can't see it. It's often worth paying a professional to take the pictures.

No Contact Info: I don't know how times I've been researching a company, went to their web site, but couldn't find an easy way to contact them. Always have a phone number on your site for people to call you about additional questions that the site may not have.

Aged Content: Keep your site up-to-date and changing. People will stop coming to your site if the information looks data or if its always the same. I'm not saying totally redesign your site every month, but at least once or twice a year change the pictures around and freshen up the text. If there's a section like a calendar, keep it up to date! Some people put the "Last Updated" tag at the bottom of their page, this can be good and bad. If you forget to update it or if it doesn't update automatically, you site will look dated. If you don't update it frequently, maybe it would be best not to put the date a! t all.

Services: Have your site reflect what your business does. I saw a realtor agent's site once that after looking it over and reading, I had a hard time telling if he was a realtor or a little league baseball coach. There was another trucking company who's site had not pictures of trucks and didn't even mention trucking till you dug down 4 or 5 pages deep. Most people would have left long before that.

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