- Overachieving graphics – By this I mean you want the pretty pictures but are not willing to write text to go along with it. Yes they will look at the picture, but unless you are cousin to a google engineer, the graphic alone won’t bring in visitors. Unless of course you are images.google.com
- Poor copy writing – Hire a copy writer to work with your seo guy. Usually one can’t do the other, because the odler copy writer doesn’t know seo, and the seo guy is too young to know how to write well…
- Targeting the wrong market – It’s hard to determine unless you have a marketing department who is your likely target in your industry. And unless you are skilled at SEO you won’t know what a micro niche market is either.
- Not targeting any market – Using a shotgun approach won’t work. You need to pick your battles.
- Poor design – not all web construction people are also art directors. Normally a well done site, one with a budget preferably, will have both.
- Takes too long to load a page – THis is graphics killing your site another way. If it takes too long to load then your visitors will leave. It’s even less than seven or eight seconds, when that used to be the standard. And even less for an e-commerce site.
- Too flashy and cutesy – Unless you are marketing to an eight year old, too flashy will turn off most visitors. If the web development team doesn’t use html5 for your screens, then perhaps you are losing a market that lives on mobile or devices that won’t play swf files (flash).
- Using poor contrast in color mixing – For an older market its crucial to pick colors that won’t get you blindsided by delivering content without contrast. As you get older your eyes get worse, and contrast is not just a nicety, its a necessity…
- Poor credibility – Not having testimonials, or privacy policy page where it can be noticed both from the home page and from our contact page. Even any of the above items will kill credibility.
- Poor font choice – There are certain fonts that are web safe, use those. Having uniform font selection throughout the site is the mark of a professional web construction, or art director.
- Navigation is non-uniform – Having a sidebar with navigation is nice, as long as secondary and tertiary pages use the same style. Having breadcrumbs is necessary for larger sites. Have a good way to back out of a page without clicking the back button. Having a huge menu is a turn off, but sometimes is the easiest way to allow visitors to see what you offer.
It’s important to take the time to develop a good web site but many times you need to consider your target market audience. You can’t fish where the lake is dry or the fish aren’t in school! Search Engine (SEO) has many facets, one of which is finding your target audience. Two things have to exist for you to succeed; You will need traffic and you will need motivated traffic. You cannot expect to come home with dinner on the table if the fish aren’t buying what you think you are selling.
