Are you driving customers away from your website?

As a business owner you know the importance of marketing your products. Some companies go to great efforts to brand their business image in various forms of media. Newspaper, radio and television are a few of the old standards.
Now we are in the digital world with instant content delivery to your customers and 24 hour access to your business information. So why are a lot of businesses not making it on the net? It's plain and simple, they lack the knowledge and experience that has been acquired by other advertising mediums with very long track records.

Lets look at some mistakes made by business owners and there websites.

Navigation

This is one area that many business owner and new web designers miss the mark on. Navigation is nothing more than a way to tell your visitor where everything is located on your site. Some basic rules need to be applied to this area to ensure your visitor does not get frustrated and leave.
Keep all navbars (Navigation Bars) located on the left side or just below the top of the header (Masthead). These are standards that have been around for a very long time and viewed by many surfers as the first place to look and any other method of navigation might confuse them.
A site map is also a very important page. This will allow your readers to go to one page and see links to every page on the site.
For a large site with a lot of content, something else you should consider would be a search feature on your page. Do all you can to make the site easy to navigate and you may just find a relationship building between you and your customer.

Page Sizes
Broadband is growing but is not number one yet! Remember that a lot of your customers will be using dialup; the old 56k connection has served us well, but with the advent of high-speed net connections it seems a lot of web designers and business owners have forgot about 70% of the population are using dialup!

Couple points to consider:
1Don’t load your page with too many pictures. If you require a lot of visual content make sure it is optimized.
2Keep the graphics to a minimum. Make sure you incorporate your company logo, but remember, a lot of unnecessary graphics will slow down the load time.

Most companies when getting their first site done want to have everything they possibly think of on their page. Do not make your page cluttered; this makes it hard for your customer to find out about the products and services you sell. Make the site logical; use good navigation. Don’t write paragraph after paragraph of useless information. You want to hook them with a bit of information and then have them inquire about more of the features offered with the product or services.
Make sure you publish your contact information. That includes phone number. Would you want to deal with a business that does not include their phone number?
The most important thing to do is think like the consumer. Look at some of the big companies and how they do it. You will soon see that cleanness and proper navigation will keep your customers coming back.

Copyright 2005 Terry Henry, all rights reserved