Your Business Website – Don’t Make These Mistakes

The website boom of the early 21st century showed us that the business world was indeed ready to enter in world of the internet. However, times have changed, and many of the websites have not changed with it. Here are a few mistakes that website make in today’s internet culture.

1)Infrequent updates- To have a website that gains the most business, you must have the best, most up to date website possible. If a visitor feels that you do not properly maintain and update you website, then chances are they will leave and find a similar business that does.

2) JavaScript pop ups- A JavaScript pop up is a notification window that opens when you visit a website that states and message and has an “ok” button at the end. This was extremely popular during the website boom, but quickly become a no-no, mainly because people over used it. Not only would they ad the pop up to the main page of their website, but they would also add one to each and every sub page. Typically these pop ups did not contain any information that would be viewed as important to the viewer. This was annoying then, and is much more annoying now, since newer computer system also have a noise that goes with the popup. If you have a message that MUST display to the user before they can go further on your website, then a JavaScript pop up may still be a good option, but I strongly caution you to not overuse it, if you use it at all.

3) Heavy graphics- You have to remember that a percentage of your visitors will be on a dialup connection, which means they will have trouble downloading your website if you have a large number of graphics on your website. Unless your website is in flash, I would try to avoid using any type of animated graphic, since they typically have large file sizes.

4) Using heavy, high contracting colors- This was another thing that was popular during the internet boom that quickly become unpopular due to overuse. It was once believed that high contracting colors would grab the users attention. While this is true, it also has a negative effect since it would hurt the user eyes, and sway them away from the website.

5) Clutter up pages- If your website seems be cluttered visitors will be less likely to view further into your website, especially if they think they will have to weed out the information they need from the information that is useless to them. You do not want to have too much information on each page, and you never want more then one topic on each. A good navigation system will eliminate any problem you have.

6) Lack of a navigation system- many websites created during the internet boom lacked one of the most important parts of a website. One a visitor clicked on a page they were taken to a new page without a way to return or access additional pages within the website. A navigation system insures that the visitor will be able to view your entire website. A good navigation will take the visitor back to the page that they originally come from, to the main page, and to the other major parts of the website. Additionally, the navigation (typically near the bottom of the page) should have links to things such as website polices and term and conditions.

7) Overusing Advertising- This is actually a fairly new problem with website, especially since Google started their Adsense program. Many website have more ads then information on the page. A visitor does not want to have to weed though the ads to find the content that they are looking for. The irony of the situation is: A visitor is more likely to click on an advertisement link if they do not feel that they are being bombarded by them. This is defiantly a situation where the saying “less is more” is true.