5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Website
Or Else You Could be Throwing Money Away…
It is said that a visitor to a website makes their mind up whether to stay within 3-5 seconds of landing on your site. This is the average time – some people will decide in a second.
So below are just 5 simple ways that you can ensure you don’t lose their attention before they’ve seen how great your site is:
1. Don’t Use Splash Pages A splash page is a front page that people see before they ‘enter’ your site. Fashionable for a while, it’s long been decided that they are detrimental to you holding your viewers attention. Pretty pages with flashing images that say ‘click here to enter’ can often lead to your visitor hitting their back button. These pages also can take time to load and it’s time your visitor is often not willing to give!
2. Keep the Banner Ads to a Minimum You want to make some money from your site but even the least web savvy people have trained themselves to gloss over banner ads. Blinking flashing images splashed all over your page is a turn off to visitors. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use any – but less can sometimes be more in term of revenue. Try recommending services via affiliate links and give great value and content, this will reward you with higher payment returns.
3. Clear Navigation Make your site as simple to navigate as you possibly can. If it looks confusing then your visitors will be unsure about entering. If they find themselves lost in an array of sections with no navigation back to the home page they will be clicking out of your site rather than reading your info.
Keep your category menus to the left, where a customer expects to find them. Make sure that your categories are clearly separated and defined to prevent the customers eyes from glazing over. Drop down menus can work very well if they are kept simple – but don’t always work so well for SEO purposes, and too many menus with sub menus or not enough menus with clear navigational links can see your site sink without a trace. Go with the KISS method – Keep It Simple Stupid – works every time!
4. Think Twice About Using Music On Your Site This will depend on what kind of site you are running and what audience you are trying to appeal to. If you were an R&B music based site then your customers would likely appreciate hearing something along those lines.If you want your visitors to stay a long time then you might want to rethink this as the same tune over and over again can become annoying.
Yes, they can turn down the volume, but it’s far easier to click to a different site. If you are using music, have clear onsite controls where they can turn it down or off and please make sure that you have permission to use whatever music you play.
5. Provide Excellent Content This should go without saying but the only way you are ever going to get a loyal following of visitors and customers is if you provide excellent content. With so many websites and blogs popping up over the Internet every, single day, it’s almost impossible to create something that isn’t already being done somewhere else in some form of another.
What you can do though, is DO IT BETTER. There may be many sites on similar topics but there are very few who are doing it really well. Give your visitors great content and value and your site will rise above the rest.
Related posts:
- 7 Ways to Ensure Customer Loyalty – Part 1 Whether it’s your team of staff managing your customer service...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
