The Internet is like a pedestrian street with lots of shop windows. If a shop window is not interesting enough, move on to the next one. Especially when mistakes like these are made.
1. Sun-yellowed displays: obviously obsolete content
Especially small and medium-sized companies like to “shine” with it: a news section whose latest news has already been published 11 months ago. Since the last entry, unfortunately, there is no longer a student who was the only one who knew how to use the complicated Content Management System.
Remedy: Regular blogging ensures that the homepage is up-to-date and gives visitors a reason to visit them regularly. Why a blog is so important, learn here.
2. Grotty shop window design: web design that deters
There are many ways to make the homepage dissuasive for visitors. Bad design is one of the main reasons for visitors who are looking for something new. A new site visitor quickly gets his verdict on your website – according to studies, this happens in just 50 milliseconds on a fully loaded page. Well, if the site looks inviting enough to spend a little more time on it.
Incidentally, the overall impression also includes the advertising on your side – on attractive pages advertising is usually discreetly built into the design. And watch out for what you advertise – Google Adsense often hides very questionable ads. Here’s how to hide dubious Adsense advertising.
Tip: Use sizable graphics to lighten text. What does not work are graphics that look pixelated because of their poor quality or falsely scaled images whose proportions have been defaced. Also fatal: graphics with several megabytes in size, which take a long time to finish loading.
3. Unsympathetic seller grin: Online appearance not serious
Surely you have seen on holiday ever intrusive street vendors who compete quite aggressively for customers. Why are these journeymen so uncomfortable? Because they look dubious and you do not feel good about leaving your money there. If you come back with a problem the next day, the street vendor may have moved on to the next town.
Unfortunately, a homepage is also very dubious. Often due to missing items. Are there an imprint (is required by law), references and an “About Us” section on your page?
Remedy: try to give your visitors a picture of who is behind the page – preferably with name and photo. And if your company is a real company, you will also educate the staff team and the building where your company is located. Tell the story of the company. All this creates trust and is important for building a customer relationship.
4. Seller scream: Poor text level
The internet is still mostly text. And this text should have a level that suits your target audience. On the Internet, the attention span is not very high, so most website surfers do not want to be annoyed with complicated prose. Fun sets usually work better. Texts are divided into easily digestible sections, which are titled with crisp headlines.
Tip: avoid spelling errors and make sure that they are understandable by checking texts against each other according to the four-eye principle. If you want to publish your homepage in different languages, have the translation done by a professional. And no, it’s not enough that Jim from the Irish Pub understands German quite well – that does not make him a translator.
5. Growing product range: Navigationlessness
You’ve probably seen a one-euro shop from the inside. Normally, it is a bit chaotic, because the goods are not structured very well – that makes it difficult to find the item you are looking for.
Remedy: make it as easy as possible for visitors and search engines to find their way around your homepage. Navigation should be tailored to the needs of your visitors, not your internal organization.
Avoid too much creativity in navigation. For example, a navigation with questions:
WHAT? | WHO? | WHY? | WHERE?
This may seem funny at first glance, but unfortunately hardly any of your visitors have the time or desire to muster the mental energy to transform the questions into their usual format, which should rather look like this:
SERVICES | ABOUT US | OUR BENEFITS | CONTACT
Incidentally, to make it easier for search engines to navigate your website, you should have a sitemap. This is usually through your content management system or your home page builder
6. An entrance door that is stuck = no smartphone-enabled website
Imagine entering your shop with only sneakers. Customers who wear leather shoes, sandals or boots can only look at their goods from the outside. This is more or less what happens if you do not offer a mobile version of your homepage.
With us are e.g. 15% of all visitors smartphone or tablet users, which is now a fairly average number. Only a year ago, it was 9%, which is almost doubling. A mobile website adapts to the display size of the device, so there are no display problems.
Tip: Luckily, all modern homepage builders now have an automatically generated mobile website. You can find out more in our Homepage Building Kit Test Reports.
7. Lack of security system: no SSL encryption
If you use a homepage builder, you do not have to worry about it. The HTTPS protocol is enabled there by default for added security. Because that’s what your visitors should not get displayed in the web browser: