Designing a beautiful website is not enough to make it click with your audience. If you are wondering why your website does not attract enough traffic, you may be doing something wrong without knowing it. Here are 5 common mistakes made by beginner website owners.
A Blind Alley
Some websites serve as a blind alley because they contain a lot of information that leads to nowhere. Giving your visitor nothing to do other than read long pieces of text is going to bore them. Your website should facilitate some kind of action like making a purchase, signing up for more information, or sending an inquiry.
Non Functional Elements
Putting up your website before it is completely functional is a bad idea. When a user visits a website, he or she expects a perfect user experience. When a user clicks on a link or button and finds it to be nonfunctional, it creates disappointment and weakens the user’s intention to visit the website again. You need to test run the website a number of times to ensure that every link and button works properly before making it available to users.
Outdated Content
The worst thing you can do to your website is to maintain outdated content on it. The problem with outdated content is that it causes visitors to lose faith in your website and they easily switch over to another source. Another problem with maintaining outdated content is that it can cause your website to be ignored by search engines because they tend to focus on keywords that may be absent from your content. Once visitors sense that your website has sloppy content and is maintained by a lazy administrator, they are not going to return again.
Complicated Website Design
This is a pitfall that many website owners fall into. In the quest to differentiate their website from competitors or even to simply revamp the website, website owners commission highly complex and cumbersome designs. Remember, that your website needs to provide a service; it is not a museum or a monument to inspire awe in your visitors. Keeping things simple will help visitors become familiar with your website. Instead of creating complicated designs, focus on making the website easy to navigate and search for specific information. When designing your website, it is important to keep a balance between current trends and traditional patterns so that your design does not become outdated very frequently.
Lack of Value Addition
Having a purpose to your website is absolutely essential. Everybody wants to have a voice on the Internet because it seems so easy. But your voice will not be heard by the online traffic if it does not offer something of value. Whether you own a personal website or a professional website to run a business, make it purposeful by adding some value through the online presence. If you run a store, use your website to order products and also pre order out of stock or upcoming products. This is how customers will visit your website if they cannot find something they like at your physical store.
Nothing wrong with only making these four mistakes. Without failure how would we be able to determine success?