There are many factors that go into making a website that sucks, and which include everything from font color and background contrast to unreadable text, bad grammar, and – this is a biggie: failure to provide adequate call to action or any contact info. Most webmasters or people with websites trying to make money on the web might be surprised to learn some of the main factors that cause people to jump on them because their website just plain sucks.
Here are seven main reasons a website sucks:
- Ugly or repellent logo and graphics. This one is listed first because it’s the first thing we see when we load a page: the colors and graphical look of it. Stick with what traditionally works to compel people to hang around, is what the experts are saying. Steer far away from, say, the color orange, which focus group studies have shown causes a 30% decrease in conversions. Shades of blue are best, as they are much more inviting.
- Poor choice on contrast. Experts also advise not to get fancy with different contrast levels off the greyscale variants. Again, stick with what works, and is easy to read – like a book. This means white background with black text, or vice versa. Those who get fancy with, say, purple backgrounds with black text, or yellow with white will just make your badly-contrasted web page visitor bounce right out of there!
- Failure to provide contact info. As mentioned earlier, this is a big one. Why is that? If you provide lots of great, compelling info, but your ready-to-make-a-purchase web visitor begins jumping around looking for how to contact you – and can’t – then you will lose that potential sale, period. Always have your name and phone number up top on every page of your website, and if it is an e-commerce or business site, then you’ll NEED either a shopping cart page and/or a nav bar button that says “Contact Us” that leads them to a contact form or page with all your contact info.
- Bad screen resolution. “Make your website readable on all devices” goes the recent advice from web dev experts. This means don’t have outsized Dreamweaver pages that cause users to have to horizontal scroll to see it all. Remember, most people are now accessing web pages on mobile devices as well.
- Data overload, or “TMI!”. Unless you are running a technical or educational website that needs to be jam-packed with information, don’t overwhelm your web audience with tons and tons of text, graphics, banners, etc. Keep it simple, and say what you need to say with as few words as possible. Your web page visitors will appreciate this more than having to read a college technical paper – that is, unless it’s for MIT.edu.
- Your blog is not maintained or updated. This is a more minor point, but still relevant. Mostly, this will cause Google rankings to bounce on you before human users do, but there are plenty of web surfers out there who will see that you’ve “left the building” on your site and follow suit because if you don’t care, why should they?
- Failure to provide a clear call to action. This is a big no-no in the world of e-commerce, online marketing, and SEO: You provided lots of great information on your amazing products, but…you forgot to compel your potential customer to buy with a clear and simple call to purchase your product or contact you for a consultation. Whoops! Your potential sale and maybe even loyal customer just vanished – possibly forever.
Don’t let any of these things happen to you. For more information on how not to have your website suck, Haxxess Enterprise Corporation is the leader in providing managed IT services in Sudbury, North Bay and Northern Ontario. Contact our expert IT staff at (705) 222. -TECH or send us an email at [email protected], and we will be happy to answer any and all your questions.
