Getting people to click on your site is only the beginning,and first impressions count. In fact, research shows us that web design drives a whopping 94% of first impressions.
Bad design leads to lower trust,higher friction and lower traction. So, no matter how much you spend on driving traffic to your site, if your design isn’t right, your leads will walk straight out the door.
Make your website earn its keep, put it to the litmus test of these common design mistakes.
Here are some common mistakes that mean people won’t buy from your website – so have a look and see if you recognise any of them on your site!
1: Low quality, irrelevant visuals
A website should be viewed as a shop window to a bricks and mortar business, rather than being simply online catalogues.
Here are some samples of what some study participants of the research Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites had to say about poorly designed sites:
- “[On] one of them I didn’t like the colour of [it]. I couldn’t wait to get out. It was an insipid green backdrop. It just put me off reading it.”
- “There was nothing I liked about it at all. I didn’t like the colours, the text, the layout.”
- “I found the screen too busy. I couldn’t quite latch onto anything straight away.”
2: The site doesn’t appeal to the target Audience
Who is your target audience?
Do you sell to consultants, academics or delivery drivers?
Now examine your website.
Does it speak to your demographic? Are the pages reading level appropriate? Is it comfortably within their education level? Will the design, images and content appeal to them?
It’s unlikely that a delivery driver will willingly read the Financial Review, or an graduate read a petrol head magazine, so don’t try to make them.
3: Content is stale and boring
Users spend roughly 5.59 seconds focusing on a site’s written content. These statistics come from eye-tracking studies conducted at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. You don’t have much time to capture a readers’ attention, so make sure that you write great stuff.
Have you ever scrolled to the bottom of a web page to where a copyright date is listed, and found that it’s outdated by a year, or two? It doesn’t offer much confidence that the company who owns the site is doing any recent business.
4: Under-estimating the importance of the ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ pages
You’d be surprised at how many users check out your ‘About Us’ page. We used heatmaps to track users’ behaviours on clients websites across 10 different industries and found that ‘About Us’ is one of the most visited pages on the website.
The ‘Contact Us’ page ranks almost on the same scale. Even if you run business from home, your website should have a phone number and email address for users to see and call or email. Having a simple web form without any basic contact information looks transient and suspicious.
Users do actually want to know more about you so showcase what you’ve got. If you have great staff, tell them. If you have high profile clientele, let them know.
5: The shopping cart experience is poor
Have you ever personally bought something from your website?
How many steps were involved? If it was more than one, then it was too many.
In other words, your checkout should be a one pager. Requiring guests to sign up before they can check out, or even view the home page, is another turn-off. You need to facilitate a checkout option for guests.
6: Your site doesn’t look right on phones.
Mobile now accounts for 12% of global Internet traffic, and it’s scaling faster than the desktop did. If your website is not mobile enabled, you’re going to miss out on a growing population of users.
7: You forgot a ‘call to action.’
Once you have the visitors to your website, dont forget to ask those visitors to do the thing you want them to do. “Call now,” “Request a quote,” or “Complete this survey.” If you don’t ask, they may go elsewhere!
8: You forgot social-media content or tools.
If you’re not pulling in some aspect of social media–Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos–into your website or giving users an easy option to disseminate your content onto these networks, you’ll look as if you’re living in the Dark Ages.
Here at InstaDigital we can complete a FREE audit of your website including:
SiteSpeed, SEO, User Experience Scoring and Test Purchasing – Why not CONTACT US today and get your website working for you! Don’t get left behind!
