How your website repels possible clients: Rising practices and trends dying out
Do you see the difference between these two websites? We’ve come a long way since the grey, rectangle designs in the nineties to the sleek, effective ones we can see in today’s websites.
These differences are not purely visual and they haven’t been introduced solely to make the websites look prettier. In case you’re planning to redesign your website any time soon, you’ll have to play smart and avoid some of the pitfalls of web design.
Though they may seem like details to you, they can affect your business by driving away a majority of your potential clients.
Many features of today’s design trends are there because they have a purpose to serve. They make the experience of your visitors more pleasant and logical.
Even though there are strong evidence that go in favour of such design trends, many of the websites we see today have one or more features listed below. And today we will try to explain in which way they can repel your potential clients and harm your business.
Unresponsive design
According to StatCounter, in October 2016 Internet usage made a huge milestone. 51.3 percent of the worldwide usage came from mobile devices.
Now you see why it is considered a must to have your website optimised for mobile devices. As more and more users spend time surfing the web using smartphones and tablets, responsive websites became a necessity.
The importance of this is recognised even by Google, that’s why responsiveness became one of important factors for search engine rankings.
When it comes to your business, responsiveness plays a great role in turning visitors into potential clients. Regardless of the service or the product you are offering, chances are that nearly a half of your visitors are coming from mobile devices.
If you don’t give them a pleasant experience of scrolling through your website looking for the information they need, the chances are they won’t stay on your website long enough to actually create a conversion.
Blocks of content
If you take a look at this blog post, you will see that I am mostly using short paragraphs of unequal length. While most of the time I do it unconsciously, it’s still a good thing to practice.
Such structure of text is easier for you to follow and stay focused.
You are not bored by the blocks of texts and unusually long sentences. And this is not the method you should stick to only in blog writing: The same goes with website copy, articles, and even newsletters.
If your landing page copy has lengthy blocks of text, your visitors will most likely not even skim through. He will close the tab and find a website that is more appealing to his eye.
Pop-ups
Now this is a difficult topic to talk about. Even though many people resent stumbling over any kind of pop-up, there are still advocates that promote this kind of, let’s say, intrusive method.
Pop-ups are most often used to promote a product or to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter or a service. However, their reputation of being irritating seems to be everlasting.
Way back in 2004, according to tests conducted by a Nielsen Norman Group, 95% of users said that they found pop-ups to be a negative web experience. Even though today pop-ups tend to be less aggressive than they were thirteen years ago, they are still frowned upon by a majority of users.
Not only do they intrude on what is supposed to be an easy-going experience, but they also often require a user to sign up to the mailing list long before he had a chance to check out whether the website is actually offering what he came for.
Difficult navigation
If there was something that particularly annoyed me as a student, it was the website of my faculty. For the first two years, I assumed that it was intentionally designed to drive all the students insane.
It was ridiculous. The basic information, like timetables and the finals schedule was hidden behind what seemed like hundred clicks. Not to mention the mission of finding a TA’s email or the info about office hours. However, the information on the latest seminars attended by the professors and how the faculty celebrated some anniversary were right there on the front page.
If I weren’t a student, and if the information I was looking for weren’t important to me at that time, I would have probably never bothered to look.
Improper navigation can turn potential clients away from your website. Try keeping the most important info as visible as possible and at a hand’s (or click’s) reach. A serious client will not wait for you to tell him about how you spent your holidays before he decides whether he wants your services.
Slow loading
This is a topic we will talk about in depth in the following weeks, however, it is also worth pointing out right here, especially if you’re currently planning to redesign a website.
Slow loading of a website is one of the major pet peeves for the website owners.
The trouble with slow loading is two-fold: First of all, it repels your visitors. And secondly, it can harm your ranking on search engines.
An average internet user is a very inpatient person. And slow loading websites are something that can turn him away from a potential conversion even without him being aware of it. If you think about it, you are most likely one of those users. When was the last time you waited for a site to load if it took him more than 15 seconds?
On the other hand, there are search engines. If a search engine notices that your website takes an eternity to load, and that your visitors are leaving your website without taking any action, it will considerably affect your rankings.
One of the ways you can make your website faster is by using optimized images and regularly cleaning the plugins you no longer use. We will talk a lot more about this in the future-
Flash
Flash was a huge thing more than a decade ago, but it slowly stopped being a part of our digital lives. And you should be thankful for that.
If your website is still something of a monument dedicated to Flash, you are probably losing more visitors than you know. It’s not by accident that Flash became a thing of past in the world of web design.
Firstly, Flash animation doesn’t work on either iPhones or iPads. And that means more bounce rate for you. Secondly, even the users coming from other devices won’t stick to you if your flashy animation isn’t followed by quality, appropriate content.
And since even Amazon and Chrome started filtering it out since last September, the guess is that you should start, too.
Background music
For one thing, think about when was the last time you visited a website with music in the background. Better yet, when was the last time that you liked the music that was playing on such website.
And no, it’s not all about your taste in music. Background music can damage the speed of loading of your website and, as we’ve seen above, that’s a thing to be avoided.
In addition to that, over the years it was shown that people more often than not get irritated by the music on a website. If a user happens to be visiting your website for the very first time, it can be very hard for him to find the buttons to turn down the volume (if you happened to remember to include such button), or to turn off the music completely. Irritated, your visitor will most likely just close the tab and look for another solution.
On the other side, if you make the music player more prominent, you are risking shifting the focus from what’s important on your website. A reason enough to steer clear from adding background music to your website.
Conclusion
While we are aware that what appeals to one eye doesn’t have to appeal to the other, when it comes to web design, we have to look behind the things looking pretty.
You, as a business owner, have to bear in mind that you are creating a website for your clients, not for yourself.
While you may be sitting at your computer desk for an entire day and finding the whole story about optimisation for mobile devices to be obsolete, your clients can be moms running late to pick up the kids from school, or digital nomads finding a nearest restaurant with a decent WiFi signal. And it’s your website that could be the one to give them the right answers.
