What are people thinking when they see your website?
Perhaps it’s time to get a second opinion of your website.
You may be looking at your website as if it were your own baby. Your pride and joy. You’ve spent the time to care and nurture it, spent the money on fancy graphics and told your friends and family to share it on Facebook.
Though it’s time to take a step back and consider the opinions of others. Website design is very subjective as we discuss in our post about the importance of good website design, and you need to think if your perhaps being a bit bias, as there’s always room for improvement.
So it’s time to get a second opinion.
Top 5 common mistakes with a bias perspective
1. You’ve got a big fancy logo that you’ve plastered at the top of your website
“Make the logo bigger!”
You’ve likely put a lot of efforts into your logo and branding to be proud of. Though it shouldn’t take such prominence on your website. This is why brand awareness is key, as it’s quick and familiar.
Once a user has landed on your website, they ned to know exactly what you do and how you can help them.
Studies show that a user takes on average, 7 seconds to decide if this website is worth spending further time on. 7 seconds really isn’t a lot of time.
If a user spent 3 seconds focusing on the logo, that’s 4 seconds left to browse the headline that contains the important stuff. (Which I’ll cover in point 2)
Instead, keep the logo at readable size and use the shapes of your logo to style the rest of your pages.
For example with the Reddy homepage, the shapes within the logo are subtly used as background images. This helps break up the content whilst still providing that familiar branding. To support the branding further, the colour of the logo is also used for buttons and graphics.
2. Your introduction copy content is wishy washy
People come to your website because they have a problem or a need that you can possibly help with. So if your immediate content is all ‘me me me’, with your company values, industry jargon and showing off the award logos your business has won (that your readers may never have even heard of)..
Then you’re not educating readers about your services and you’ve likely lost their interest. Think about point 1 above and the 7 second average and get your head out of the tunnel.
Yes, it is important to show off awards you’ve won, how long you’ve been in business for, the standards and values of your business, the testimonials from your happy clients and so on. But these will be peppered further down the homepage as ‘trusability points’. You can expand on these further with your ‘About Us’ page.
Particularly on your homepage where the user commonly lands – you need to get to the point.
In the header, use a headline to grab their interest,. Keep this short and sweet. e.g. ”Coventry city centre’s best burger van for hire”
This should spark the interest of the reader enough for them to read a slightly more detailed description in the sub header. e.g. ”Available for festivals, gigs and parties to serve burgers, hot dogs and veggie alternatives!”
In the above example, you’ve explained who you are, where you are and what you do in 2 small sentences. Now they’re ready to continue reading through the rest of your website and learning about your services.
Have a go at summarising your own business in a simple statement and get the opinions of others. This can often be difficult to nail if you have many varying services to offer, but it’s important to break it down for a new reader to easily digest.
Your copy content should be original, informational and packed full of optimised keywords. Check this post here for the Importance of SEO.
3. There’s too much on the home page
Your home page is the common place for a user to ‘land’ on and is an informational navigation point.
Particularly if you have a lot of information to share and various services on offer, it’s a common mistake for business owners to pack on the content far too heavily. Ideally, you want the user to spend as few brain calories as possible, to get them from A to B.
Instead, break down the information into digestible chunks. Link the chunks to other pages where the user can gather more information on an aspect they’re particularly interested in. Here’s some examples on how to keep your home page content digestible:
- Separate your services into category boxes. A short statement to each category is all that’s needed to explain the product or service; followed by a call to action button for ‘Find out more’. This button takes the user immediately to content they’re after.
- If you have a large section of copy, use a ‘read more’ link that expands the content on the page when clicked, so that the user isn’t immediately seeing an overwhelming amount of text.
- Use sliders for galleries, logos of companies you have worked with and testimonials. This is especially important on mobile devices as you need to consider the additional amount of scrolling required on smaller screens.
- Break down your sales process into 3 easy steps. This reassures your reader that working with you is simple. e.g.
- Request a free call back
- Tell us about your problem
- Book it in!
We discuss more about a good homepage structure in our post about user journeys and copy content.
4. The customer is given too much choice
Your customer is given too much information to digest, they’re getting confused, clicking around your website and .. they’ve gone.
You need to steer them in the right direction. At the end of the day, your website is there to generate leads and sales. Be sure it’s optimised for that purpose!
A call to action (CTA) is quite literally, a button calling to the user telling them to action something. They’re often in the opposite colour to the majority of your website as it stands out to the user.
This action could be to book in a call, add a product to the basket, read more about the service or download a free brochure. But the language should be for a clear, simple instruction, such as ‘Get my free guide!’
It is also recommended to keep the wording the same on repeatable CTAs. This means the reader understands what the clear action to be taken is.
The difference between ‘Get my free guide!’ and ‘Download the brochure’ could read as two completely different downloads.
For example with Reddy, ‘Get a free quote’ is the most commonly used CTA. This is because it is one of the main goals with our website. To generate leads, we’re showing our audience where we want them to go.
5. Not appearing credible
There are many factors that potential customers look for in this modern online world to persuade them to part with their data and cash.
If you already have customer reviews on external tools such as Trust Pilot and Google reviews .. use them! There are tools available to display live stream feeds of your reviews however, adding the providers logo as a clickable image to open up a separate tab in the users browser, to read all of your reviews from a trusted supplier – works well too. (Check out our post on Choosing the right review tool)
If you are not in a position to display your reviews (particularly if you are a start up business) then there are still other ways to boost your credibility. Here’s a few good examples:
- Images of you, your employees, products on offer or even the building you work in. This puts faces to names and shows you have a human approach.
- Cherry picked, written testimonials added directly to your site and not via a third party.
- Logos of brands directly worked with (ideal if these are well known / known to the locals you are targeting).
- Logos of branded tools and equipment you use to complete your works, showing your industry knowledge.
- Certification badges and awards, e.g. to prove specialist knowledge, being apart of a trusted scheme, or known to a board.
Get a second opinion on your website
Present your website to somebody who ‘says it how it is’. Ask them to go through the journey and feed back on how simple they found it.
Customer feedback will also highlight areas for improvement.
Perhaps live chat questions are frequent on a certain topic, or your traffic is dropping off to quickly; after analysis from tools such as Google Analytics.
We advise integrating tools such as Hot Jar heat map tools, which will show you the behaviour of users, including where their attention is drawn to and what parts of your website are ignored.
Constructive criticism should be looked at positively. It will help your growth by standing back and looking at the bigger picture with the help of somebody else’s perspective.
