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. Copyright (c) 2007 Quick Turn Marketing International, Ltd.
A former college dropout, Dan "The Man" Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to an internet multi-millionaire. Discover how you can maximize your website profits in minimum time. For a limited time, you can test-drive Dan's Insiders Club for 30-days Risk-Free and get $1,165 dollars worth of bonus gifts. Rush cover to: http://www.websiteconversionexpert.com/testdrive.html
