5 Website Mistakes You Don't Want to Make.

bymertens

238 followers

Updated 4 years ago

The idea behind this blog is simple:

Read it all the way and act on it if necessary.

It will improve your web presence, raise your profile and earning potential.

The inspiration and examples come from the WA SiteFeedback and Comment section.

Most WA members are at the beginning of their journey when they put up their sites for feedback.

Your mind is busy with finding the right niche, a suitable theme, wrestling with technical terms and still digesting the mountain of training you just went through.

Nevertheless, any of the errors below will prevent your young and tender online business to take off and reach its potential.

1. What good is content if only YOU understand it properly?

Do you remember the last time a catchy tune wouldn't leave your head? You whistled it to somebody, utterly convinced that he/she would get it immediately.

To your bafflement, the person didn't recognise the song at all.

The explanation is straightforward.

You have the melody in your head, but the other person doesn't (the other option is that you are a lousy whistler).

His/her head is full of whatever is going on in their life except for the song.

The same analogy applies to content creation.

You write your texts with all the accumulated research and knowledge in YOUR head.

The visitors, however, arrive at your website with entirely different expectations in THEIR heads.

Knowledge is an advantage and a curse at the same time.

Fix:

You cannot "unknow" what's in your head, so the first step is to become aware of the curse.

Your writing needs to reflect the expectations and level of expertise of your audience and not your own.

Slip into the reading glasses of your visitors.

Make an effort to imagine how someone interested in your niche would approach your site, article or blog.

Do you provide enough context for them to understand the point(s) you are trying to make (like I did with the little tune story at the beginning)?

Let a friend utterly oblivious to your niche give you unbiased feedback. If the person doesn't get what you are trying to say immediately in the first reading, change the content (or the friend).

Does this sound familiar?

It should because it is the first principle in content creation: Write for your audience - not for yourself.

2. It is not immediately clear what the website is about.

If visitors have to scroll and click around to find the meaning of the website, you have already lost them.

As surprising as it may sound, it's a common issue.

Especially review/blog sites that have just the first few lines of their blogs as homepage suffer from this problem. The titles of the blogs don't necessarily reflect the purpose of the entire site.

For example, here is the title of the first blog on this particular homepage:

"Wattage Explained or Does a kettle boil slower in America?"

Would you have known that you are on a website that reviews programmable electric kettles?

Fix:

Don't hide your intentions.

Tell people what your site is all about.

Often a few words, a one-liner or proper headline will do the job.

Let's go back to the programmable kettle review homepage from above.
To avoid any confusion, the first thing you read when you reach the website is:

"We Are All About Temperature Controlled Kettles."

It's hard not to get the right idea here.

3. Site/pages are (far) too busy.

Contrary to popular belief, choice is a decision killer.

Behavioural researchers conducted a famous experiment in a Californian grocery store a few years back.

They set up a tasting display with 24 new jams and gave every customer a $1 discount coupon towards the purchase.
At some times they could sample all 24 jams and at other times just a selection of six.

Faced with a choice of 24, the coupon redeem-rate was a meagre 4%.

When customers had only six jams to sample from, the purchase rate increased to a whopping 31%.

Having too many choices can have a paralysing effect.
The effort of making the right decision outweighs the gratification of the purchase.
As a result, customers walk away and don't buy anything.

Unfortunately, many websites try too hard.

Understandably, you want to give your visitors all options but filing every available white space with links, adds or banners will have the opposite effect.

It makes your content tedious to read and distracts from the bits that matter most.

Nathaniell posted a blog a while ago about one of his pages with 27 affiliate links, ranking number 1 but doing no business at all.

Maybe the solution below will help.

Fix:

Sometimes less is more.

Concentrate on your core message/purpose.

A cluttered website indicates a muddled approach.

So again, focus on your number 1 target like

• attracting traffic,

• build content with intention and purpose,

• getting feedback and comments,
  

• improve ranking potential (keywords, SEO),

Have the courage to leave gaps.

Embrace white space and use it to guide your visitors around your page.

You can always add more features and affiliate links once the site is properly up and running.

Coming back to Nathaniel's problem with the 27 links.Reducing the link density to a more manageable 6 or less will make it less confusing for visitors, and allow the page to generate some business.

And always remember: You can't please everybody, so don't even try.

4. Difficult to read

Fix:

Don't try to be (too) unique or alternative, or the result will be something like the picture above.

Don't give your visitors an epileptic fit when they are trying to read your pages.

Instead:

• Eliminate all background noises to create a good contrast between backdrop and writing.

• Get rid of the hectic picture frame (like the one above) because it easily distracts from the content.
  

• Highlight vital points by using bold, underlining or |blockquotes|.
  

• Say No to weird fonts, too many exclamation marks, all caps sentences and other crimes against readability.

• Be aware that colours have positive and negative connotations. Adapt a colour that complements your intentions, niche or personality. Here is a useful introduction to the psychology of colours.
  

• Stick with easy to read fonts. Digital publishing generally works better with sans-serif fonts like Ariel and Helvetica (in contrast to serif fonts like Times New Roman).

• Use the recommended H-tags for title, headlines and sub headlines. It will give you automatically a solid structure and brownie points with search engines.

5. The dewy-eyed website owner

With about 4.5 million blogs published every DAY (source: www.worldometers.info), you want to stand out to have a chance of monetising your content.

Just putting out any mouldy content on a poorly thought-out website isn't good enough anymore.

You might find this harsh, but unfortunately, naive content (to say it elegantly) and/or poorly planned websites come up regularly in the feedback section.

Fix:

Don't assume the "internet" will take care of your business.

Instead, do the WA training and plan your site properly:

1. What do you want to achieve with your website?
2. What is the #1 thing you want people to do on your website?
3. What content goes where and why?

Just imagine you are moving into a new house and you are furnishing it in your style.

If you have no ideas or trouble to visualise your site, check out and analyse other top sites in your niche. Let them inspire you and incorporate all the appealing bits into your design.

What about keywords, SEO and all the other stuff?

Completely ignore it in the beginning.

(Kyle might strike me off his Christmas card list if he reads this.)

Think about point 1-3 first.

Your visitors can spot a hastily thrown-together website a mile away.

It doesn't hurt to do some keywords research in the process, but you need to have an idea in your head and a structure in place before you mould them into your writing.

In the end, the best keywords and world-class SEO won't save your bacon if the rest of your site is a sorry-looking affair with no curb-appeal.

What does it all mean?

You can condense the effects of the above faults into just two words:

Bad UX

Every mishap contributes to a poor User eXperience which in turn will discourage the visitors from spending more time on your site.

UX consists of Utility (the features needed to work correctly) and Usability (the ease and clarity of use).

To have a useful and successful site, you need both parts in top form. If you fail in one, your website will fail as a whole.

And now the good News.

All of the above mistakes are reversible. It's up to you to decide which way your business is going.

What I've seen on many websites is dedication, hard work, passion and the willingness to give it a go.

Most owners know that this alone will not get them over the line, but it is a promising start.

The most important part of a journey is the first step.

Best of luck.
Martin

Feel free to share your experience, comments and disagreement.