Website Bloopers

This is an interesting subject and one which many people have covered in the past.  Due to the nature of this sector mistakes are ever changing, meaning that not only can some literature on this subject be outdated, but also in extreme cases previous recommendations for websites could now be deemed as major bloopers themselves.

So here is Planned Sites Top 10 12 Website Bloopers for 2009, which has a focus on making sure that your website is Google friendly.  This text has recently been adapted to include two new entries - special thanks to Brandt Dainow for those.

1. Home page that doesn’t capture your visitors imagination.  This has to happen in the first few seconds.  You need to have something on your home page which makes the visitor want to stay on your site.  Use the right colours, make sure the text is readable, engaging and don’t over complicate.  Be careful with the content, if you’ve worked on optimisation and added keywords to the copy then make sure that the text still flows well and makes sense.

2. Avoid pages that are too big.  This is an age old mistake that companies still make, and we can’t understand it.  It doesn’t matter how great your website looks, if there is a delay in it loading up, users will navigate away from it.  It’s as simple as that.  Invariably this happens with websites which are full of flash images and videos.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t use flash or web videos, but make sure that they are professionally made.  You have to minimise the file size of the page as much as possible.  If you can’t, then use something else in its place!

3. Confusing navigation.  Make sure that your navigation makes it easy for your visitor to view the content that you want them to.  It’s no good making certain pages more difficult to find if they are important.  Sometimes you may have got landing pages which don’t link to other parts of the site, and that is fine, because that is a purposeful move to drive your visitor into a sales channel.  However, the home page and the main body of the website should have a simple menu and shouldn’t confuse.

4. Not showing contact details.  This is a debatable subject.  People are sceptical about showing contact details, due to the amount of spam emails that they may receive.  However in our opinion contact details should be clearly visible, not just on your contact page but on other pages as well.  It’s better to receive some spam which you can monitor and block, then no enquiries because you’ve been so guarded with your contact details.

5. Links sending users to other people's websites.  This is quite an obvious one really.  We’ve recently been working for a client who wanted a sales focused website which directed visitors from the home page straight through to an enquiry page.  However they also wanted links to other websites all over the home page and enquiry page.  Obviously that is a huge contradiction.  I’m not saying you can’t link to other sites, but do it in the right areas, and not when you’re about to make a sale!

6. Not updating your content.  You have to produce quality, regular content as often as possible is to compete online in 2009.  Not only does it create trust with your potential clients, but it also helps with your sites optimisation, and will inevitably increase visitors to your website.  Stagnant, old copy makes your website look unorganised and amateur, which in turn makes your company look unprofessional.

7. Requiring too much information from users.  People are busy and don’t freely like to give out too much information.  All you need are the essentials – name, contact number/email address and nature of enquiry.  All the other information can be gathered as you build a relationship with the client.  It is unnecessary to get all of the information in one hit as it’s only the visitors first time on your website.

8. Not keeping track of broken links.  It’s essential to keep track of dead links.  If you have them on your site they can look unprofessional and ruin the user experience.  Perhaps more harmfully, they are also frowned upon by Google and eventually your site will be penalised.  You can see all the links on your site by typing your domain into Yahoo Explorer.

9. No optimisation.  Often small companies with small websites will not have partaken in any optimisation.  This means that their site will never naturally attract many visitors.  I’m not saying that the Managing Director of every company has to learn SEO, and if you control your own website, it’s not something that you are technically going to be able to master.  However, following simple tips on optimising your site will go a long way.  Better yet though, get a professional SEO company to do it.
 
10. Linking to Spam sites.  Years ago, the view was that getting links to as many sites as possible was the best way to get yourself up the natural search engine listings.  Sometimes this could include spam sites which operate in large umbrella websites focusing on linkbuilding.  Google does not like these kinds of sites, and furthermore, if you are linked to them they could consider your site to be a spam site as well.  That would essentially mean that your reputation with Google would be ruined along with your chances of appearing anywhere near the top of the listings.  Ensure that you link to ‘real’ sites which have a respectable PageRank with Google.

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11. Not checking that the site works on different browsers

12. Not checking that contact forms work or that emails sent from the site are being handled.