It’s sad but true. Most of us humans shoot ourselves
in the foot in countless ways. And the same applies to very
basic, avoidable website mistakes that only encourage
visitors to exit stage right. You have more than enough
issues and obstacles getting visitors to your all-important
piece of web real estate.
Today I’ll show you 5 conversion landmines that you
can do something about right away if they apply to your
websites. The fixes are easy and will help you get the most
out of your business.
Fatal Mistake #1: Small font sizes, low contrast between
your text and the background, and fixed font sizes will
drive a hefty percentage of your visitors to your
competitors. Not good. Keep one thing in mind about your
visitors. And you do have to engage in some thinking about
your market which I hope you have already done before
building your site.
There are people of all ages and with varying degrees of
good health on the web. You know that. Older folks have
more difficulty with smaller fonts and low contrast between
text and background. But younger people are much more
impatient and will quickly tire of straining to read a lot
of small text. And research has definitely shown that
everyone scans web text. It’s much harder to scan
small text.
The best contrast combination is black text on white
background. But if you must use colored background, make
the colors compatible with each other and avoid giving
people a headache with bright colors. No one likes
headaches.
Respect the user’s preference to change the text size
if they want! And if you’re using CSS style sheets,
then avoid disabling the user’s ability to resize
text. Show your users some respect and it’ll be
another feather in your cap.
Fatal Mistake #2: Avoid using unfamiliar link formats. Or,
use unfamiliar link formats at your own peril. The
guidelines are very basic. For text links, make text that
can be clicked-on totally obvious. Most people have come to
expect text links to be blue. And underline the text links.
Avoid underlining non-link text.
If your site has many links, consider using code to
distinguish between visited and unvisited links. It’s
just a courtesy to your visitors and they’ll
appreciate it. Your visitors will appreciate helpful link
information such as what they can expect to find on the
other end of the link. Having important information in text
links will also make it easier to scan and be helpful for
SEO purposes.
Fatal Mistake #3: If you write your own content, and you
aren’t a copywriter, you’ll need to pay
attention in this area. Appropriately written web content
is short, easy to scan, to the point, written in common
language for the most part…depends on your market,
and written to some level just below a high school
education. Perhaps hard to believe but it’s true.
Content that cannot be scanned is nothing but painful to
your visitors. If your font size is small, as
well…it’s the kiss of death. There are a few
techniques you can use to make scanning easier.
Use short paragraphs of 3 to 4 sentences. Keep your
sentences relatively short and direct. Subheads and bullet
lists help to keep things interesting. Use a simple writing
style. It isn’t formal writing for school. And avoid
using terms that most people may not know.
Fatal Mistake #4: Avoid opening links in a new browser
window. There are some exceptions you may want to consider.
A link to a PDF file would be best to open in a new browser
window. Beyond that, keep your visitors on your site.
Opening a new window can be irritating because it increases
the number of click motions required to deal with all the
windows. The new window has a disabled back button…as
you know. More clicks. More aggravation. See ya! Fatal
Mistake #5: How can they be unfriendly? Simple. Have you
ever added a page to your Favorites, then later you tried
to find it? You were thinking about the site URL, or topic
maybe. But low and behold…you found it under
“T” for “The…”. Or the page
title was not quite on the topic mark for the main theme.
Also, appropriate and smart page titles will help your site
with the search engines. If you rely on organic positioning
in search, then you’ll want your most important and
relevant keywords and phrases in your page titles.
These 5 website conversion tips are but a few in the larger
scheme of things. But they’re a great place to start
and easy to implement. So go check your own site and see
how you’re doing.
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your website profits in minimum time. For a limited time,
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