Common Website Challenges

Recently I’ve been working on a couple major site renovations, and in doing so it has brought some things to mind I thought I would share.

These items are just a few common website challenges I see many website owners have and they may not even be aware that they are doing these little things that make a huge difference with their website visitors…

While some may say that I’m being overly critical, I want to point out the fact right away that with doing business online a business owner needs EVERY advantage they can get to make a difference and get their point across. With that being said let me dive right in and start explaining just a few of these website challenges.

The first of course is the over all appearance, it’s not too uncommon to visit a website and immediately see there isn’t a consistent brand or color scheme. The logo if there is one maybe be one color and the rest of the site is not complimentary to those colors. I mean it is ok to use a few different colors but myself, I try to stick to about three maybe four colors. Like on my website you will see that my main colors are charcoal and white with orange accents. This compliments my logo which happens to be predominately orange.

While I’m on the topic of colors this brings up yet another website challenge and that would be “Button Colors. I think it is a good idea to keep all of the buttons on your website the same color so that it is not confused with something else. On some websites you will see various different colors, shapes, sizes, and even different graphical buttons.

I will say on one of the sites I’ve just been working on, we use three different colors for buttons on the site and here’s why. Any of the buttons for orders are Orange so that the stand out as buttons you buy things from. Any of the buttons linking to the support desk are green so that the stand out and the visitor knows they can go there to get help. And finally all other buttons are blue. The same exact color of blue.

Also with the buttons on the websites I like to keep it fairly consistent with the text where possible. What I mean is I like to give instructions on the button text/copy, for example “Click Here To Order For Only $37” or “Click Here To Submit Your Information”. Another example might be on your blog posts, instead of just “Read More” I like to change it to “Click To Read More”.

I know that seems a little odd but by adding the “Click Here” you are reassuring the website visitor that is what they are supposed to do. If the visitor is hesitant they may not “click to buy”. Also, make a decision on whether or not you will use all lower case or title case format on the buttons. Myself, I prefer title case which means the first letter of every word is a capital or upper case letter. To me it just stands out better and gives it more visual POP as opposed to all lower case text.

Now I do want to say that in some cases it is just impossible to fit that much text on a button, and in the case of a longer sales letter where you will have several order buttons through out the length of the page it is a good idea to switch up the text on the button so that the reader doesn’t get bored seeing the same text over and over.

Another visual website challenge I wanted to point out is the images on your website. You will want to keep them consistent as well. Meaning, if you have some with round corners then make them all with rounded corners. Decide from the get go if your images will have borders or no borders. If you are using thumbnails of product shots or even info images pick a size and try to use that size through out so that your website has a uniformity.

Obviously I could go on and on with different website challenges and common mistakes and actually you can read about many of them in my book “50 Biggest Website Mistakes: Secrets to Getting More Traffic, Converting More Customers, & Making More Sales”

I want to leave you with one final website challenge for this blog post and that is to make sure your site is up to date and this is important for many reasons. First if someone comes to your site and it looks years old they will question if the product or service is even relevant or current.

Secondly, if your website is stale and stagnant and nothing has been updated in quite a while, then the search engines will not see your site as current or relevant either. For example if you have news articles or blog posts on your site and the last one was more than a couple of months old then it does not look like you are very serious about your business.

And finally, if you are running a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress for your website it’s VERY important that you keep up to date on the WordPress software as well as any themes and plugins. I would recommend making sure you have a site backup before running updates just to be safe but in many cases these are updates are for your protection from security holes that may have been found and not just features added.

If you’ve found any of these tips usefully please let me know in the comments section. Or maybe you would like to see more of these types of posts please comment on that as well. Thanks!