“How-to” tips and hints are usually valuable to anyone working on any particular activity, but so are tips about what not to do. Here are some of our recommendations with regard to your website:
Don’t;
Forget your contact information! I’m not talking just about the ‘Contact Us’ page, but on your home page and every page make sure your phone number and email address is there. I’ve seen countless websites with no contact information on the home page so the user has to hunt around for it.
Require registration or filling out of a form to get information. Just like your website should tell the user what it’s about within 10 seconds of them getting on it, the information they’re looking for should be there too. Don’t make them ask for it or have to hunt around your website to find it.
Use tiny or fancy fonts.
Use animated ads, blinking text or sounds. Not only does it date your website but they are distracting. If you must have some music because that is your industry for example, make sure the user can stop it at any time and it doesn’t start up again when they click on another page.
Have ads and not enough content. Your user is looking for information. Even if you only have a small website for credibility/marketing reasons, give the user some information about you, your profession, the industry, etc., which brings me to…….
Have poor content. If you aren’t willing and able to write good content for your website then hire someone to do it – it’s worth it! Which leads to…..
Make spelling or grammatical mistakes if you do write it yourself. PROOFREAD!
Forget keywords! The search engines can’t find your site without those words in your content.