A business, whether owned by an individual or an organization, needs to show professionalism and mastery on its website. The site needs to be enticing, welcoming, appealing to visitors and devoid of any technical issue. But unfortunately, many business sites I’ve been to lack one or more of these elements that make customers and prospective ones feel much at home.
The common mistakes
- Strange domain name – Increasing number of business websites use strange domain names that do not reflect their businesses in any way. I’ve see some that use hyphens, just because they want to include their target keywords in their domain names. Others choose very long domain names that include their most important keywords. All these cause confusion to customers and visitors. A business domain name has to be short, contains no hyphen and reflects the brand of the company. A short name that reflects a brand helps everyone to easily remember the website’s address. So, always go for memorable names!
- Bad color combination – I strain my eyes on some websites to read text, because of the bad color combinations used. Some use very faint colors for text, while others blur the text with background colors or images. It is important that a business site choose a good color combination that blends effortlessly with the entire theme. Probably the best tip I have learned about color combinations – have your text appear on a white or very like background – there is a reason books aren’t printed with white text on black pages – think about it!
- Auto-playing music – Nothing annoys me more than visiting a business site and being surprised by an auto-playing music. Some of these businesses use it as a marketing technique, but its actual effect on visitors is negative. I believe a business website should not set any marketing audio to automatically play on page load. Use proper business ethics and give visitors a choice to turn the audio on if they like to hear it.
- Contact Information – Prospective customers and existing ones deserve the right to know where the business they’re dealing with is located. But unfortunately, many business websites don’t include physical addresses on their sites. Some even lack telephone numbers where customers can reach them in real-time. These issues cause lack of trust and confidence.
- Web page loading issues – Some business websites take forever to load. This is most commonly caused by server overload, badly-coded scripts that make dumb SQL queries and those that make heavy use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), such as Flash and SilverLight. Studies have shown that Internet users have very short attention span, and want to do whatever they come for as quickly as possible. If a site doesn’t load within a few seconds, they will go off to a competitor’s site. To help keep visitors on your business site and reduce the bounce rate, get a server or hosting that guarantees faster loading of web pages. Also make sure your web-based software is developed very well with good database architecture. Moreover, avoid heavy use of RIAs, as they tend to largely slow down loading time. Flash and SilverLight are sparingly used to spice up web pages, but it is wrong for web pages to heavily depend on them.
- A Long Story about the business – I’ve noticed on so many Chinese and some other business websites that they spend too much unnecessary time and space talking about how many acres of land their factories cover and how many employees they have. A visitor is not interested in knowing these facts. Go straight to the point and let visitors know about your products and/or services and their benefits of buying them.
As a business owner, I know you will take the above-mentioned precautions seriously and not want to make the same common mistakes that drive visitors away from sites.