This month I want to share with you some helpful tips to consider when you want to bump your website up a notch.
Your website is out there for the whole world to see, it is your store front showcasing your company, product, or service. For most visitors it is their first impression they get of your company and yes, people do judge a book by its cover.You don’t have to have the slickest bells and whistles website in the world but you should give your site a professional image and stand above your competition. If you are considering a complete makeover of your existing site or you are ready to launch a brand new website, here are some tips that you may want to take note of.
Marketing experts often tell you which features your website absolutely must have. But for a post at the HubSpot blog, Kipp Bodnar created a list of items you should delete as soon as possible from your site. Here are a few items that deserve immediate elimination:
Complicated animation. There's little upside to Flash-based wizardry that hinders the visitor experience and impedes search engine optimization. "Perform a test," he advises. "Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site."
Industry jargon. Whatever your specialization, you start to assume everyone understands industry-specific language. This is a mistake. "Look through your website and highlight terms that are not commonly used outside of industry circles," Bodnar says. "Delete the highlighted words and replace them with more common explanations."
Images. Every website needs images—but you might have too many. Excessive images slow download speed when visitors click on a page, and search engines consider this a negative factor in page rankings. "Websites that have been around for a while can often collect lots of images, and some of them no longer go with the content of the site," he explains. "Keep some images, but go through and remove all images from your website that don’t help tell your company's story."
"Contact Us" forms. While you must provide contact information, Bodnar believes a generic contact form is more likely to attract spam than qualified leads. He suggests landing pages with dedicated forms for specific offers: "For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment."
Conclusion: Sometimes less at your website is more—both for your customers' user experience and search engine optimization.
If you would like to discuss your upcoming website plans please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or e-mail me at john@x2media.us
X2 Media can help you target your content and get your message to the audience in a way that it is not only seen and heard, but remembered.
Until next month….remember, “you don’t get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression”. Always make it a good one! From X2Media I would like to thank you for your time.
John E. Hornyak
X2Media, LLC
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