The 6 most frequent website design mistakes
Being in the business of identification of website visitors by company we daily visit many of websites before granting a 30-day free trial.
As the pricing of our web services is in relation to the number of monthly visitors we like to give advice to our customers in order to increase their visits (so we can charge more later on).
Five things we frequently encounter:
- The intention of the website
- The url of the pages have no significant meaning
- The keywords are the same for every page throughout the website
- The description being equal for all pages
- The main navigation menu needs to be in text
- The all Flash websites
1. The intention of the website
What do you sell ?
To who do you sell ? What is your market? B2C, B2B ?
If we can’t figure out what you are selling and to who, how will your potential customer know that he might have found a solution to his problem.
People do leave a website in less than 4 seconds if they don’t understand immediately what it is all about.
2. The urls
If your pages have an url like
http://www.company.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=235&Itemid=209
Then you can’t tell which page it is and what the page is all about.
The same is valid for Google, Bing and Yahoo: they don’t understand it neither as it has no meaning.
Each page should have a url that matches the content of the page: especially the keywords or titles used.
Just like this blog post which uses the title of the post.
http://www.LEADSExplorer.com/blog/2010/11/15/the-6-most-frequent-website-design-mistakes
If you can read it then Google can read it and tag it which makes Google happy and friendly.
3. The keywords
Many web designers seem to use the same keywords throughout the website.
However every page should have keywords matching the content of the page. Each page should be considered as a landing page attracting its’ own interested visitors.
Again this will make the interpretation and filing of your page easier for Google.
4. The description
This is similar as the keywords: the description of each page is the same. That doesn’t make the operation of the Google algorithm easier for filing your web pages.
Help Google & Co in order to help yourself.
5. The main navigation menu in text
The main navigation menu should be easily found and in text format in order to let Google read your menu items.
In case your menu consist of images then make sure all the images are named to make them understandable.
6. The all Flash website
Of course you can have Flash on your website as it will animate and make it more lively.
Still it doesn’t mean you have to have an all Flash website which is really bad for getting indexed by search engines and thus getting found by potential customers.
How to ?
A question we often get:
How to see the keywords, description and menu items:
In FireFox: Go to “View” then click on “Page Source”
In Internet Explorer: Go to “View” then click on “Source”
Have fun with this video of a presentation:
How bad is your website ?
