Having a website is a great thing, it’s really a must have now a days for most businesses as well. But just having a website is rarely good enough to tap into it’s full potential. You also need to provide a good user experience.
It’s becoming more and more common that your website is your business’s first impression with a potential customer. A bad website user experience can leave a bad impression which in turn can cost you sales and even worse, losing someone that would tell people about you.
The first issue with a website is having it load SLOW. Most visitors only give a website about 5 seconds to load before they leave, That is why Web Host Pro puts so much emphasis on being fast. In turn, having a fast website equals less lost customers. What’s more important than that?
Even though we have the best hardware and one of the world’s fastest networks, if your website is not optimized, it will still run slow. Pictures should never be more than 200k and no page should have more than 15 pictures, unless they are thumbnails. Even ten 200k pictures will take about 10 seconds to load on any network or server environment. AND if you have WordPress, you’ll need to do even more as shown here: Optimizing WordPress
The next big complaint website surfers have, is a complicated website. It should never be a scavenger hunt for them to get where they want go. Keep a simple streamlined path for visitors to get to the most common website sections like about us or your products. This is a call to action, and should be on every page. Not only keep the paths to what customers want, but you also should have an easy path to where YOU want customers to go.
Next is making sure your website is responsive. More and more people are using mobile devices to see websites. Downloaded apps are also on the decline, as websites have advanced mobile versions that work just as well. Make sure and test your website on your phone and a tablet. If it looks funny or runs off the page try a new template.
I would suggest having some social network friends test your website for you. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can find typos and formatting errors you might overlook. Offer to take them to lunch or buy them a drink for helping you out.
I like to keep my personal websites light and easy. Less graphics and cleaner images. That way when people visit their feel more comfortable and not overwhelmed.