5 Website Fixes to Make Now

Is your website the best example of your business or the worst? Is it representative of your business and the ultimate resource you can send people to so they can learn as much about your business, services, products as you could tell them in person?
Or, is your business website holding you back?

Visitors arriving at your site will probably click right off within a minute. That’s the bounce rate. People know instantly if they want to check a site out further or if they need to find another site that better meets their expectations.

Here are some fixes to your business website you need to make if it’s suffering. Don’t delay – change them ASAP.

1. Speed It Up! Though we’re now enjoying the fastest internet connection speeds on average per surfer, if your site is a dog. You’ll lose more people that come to your site than if you had a fast site. Fast is always better. Drop huge Flash files. It’s annoying. It’s too large and not well implemented. Sure it’s nice to look at – but, nobody is really looking anymore.

Compress images and especially videos. For images use www.xat.com – JPEG Optimizer is an amazing program. Learn how to use it. For video using MP4 format with H.264 compression can be the best – but not everyone has the codecs installed on their computers at this time. Instead, shrink the resolution to 320×240 or 640×480 instead of trying to host larger sizes.

Never force downloads – make it optional. Don’t lock up browsers with forced loads. Oh, and label PDF files if they’re more than 1/2 MB or so so users can right click and download without left clicking and locking up their browsers as it downloads.

2. Rewrite Product Descriptions. Have a professional copywriter re-write your product and services descriptions if you haven’t already. It’s worth the money. Professional copywriters are worth their weight in gold. It’s a talent that is worth paying for.

3. Improve the Sales Process. Update your shopping cart and other payment options. Add Paypal, Google Checkout, and other payment options if you can manage them. If you’re selling internationally Western Union is one option you can use effectively. Instead of Paypal, users in the United Kingdom tend to use Moneybookers. Can you offer that?

The more seamlessly you integrate your payment option into your business site – the better. Even if you’re using 3rd party payment solutions you need to brand the pages to be just like your website pages so it looks like an extension of – or an integral part of your business website.

4. SEO Basics. If you haven’t thoroughly optimized your site for best SEO practices you need to. Targeting search engines is the single most effective use of your marketing efforts. If you don’t have a WordPress website now, consider changing your entire site over to WP. Why? Google loves it. WP sites are dynamic and feed the search engines changes through RSS feeds. WP is easily optimized for SEO. When was the last time you heard “Easy” and “SEO” in the same sentence? WP plugins optimize SEO for you to a large degree. Sure there’s a lot more to it – but, you’ll have a great start using WP for your business website.

5. Shorten Forms. For contact forms you should only be asking for the bare-bones information. Visitors to your site don’t want to share too much with you – name and email is enough in most cases – if you’re asking them to register for your newsletter. For support email forms you can ask a lot more, but if you’re asking for your own benefit – ask the minimum.

Business Website Design Mistakes to Avoid

Like us, you’ve probably seen hundreds of design mistakes on business websites. Some entrepreneurs think they can take their personal site and twist it around to form their business site template. Business websites have come a long way since 1998. Are you living a decade in the past? Time to get up to speed. Take care of these business site design mistakes and get ready for 2010.

1. Not Planning – most of us – including us the first time, didn’t sit down and design every page of our business site. Now you must. The competition has set the bar much higher than it used to be. Before you even begin the coding you’ll need to draw out every page. Where will you have the links? What will be in the header? Everything needs to be analyzed, voted on by your group. Your ideas might NOT be the best – open it up to others you trust for a vote. Remember your site can have at most 3 goals – and must have at least 1. Your business site could 1.) Give info. 2.) Sell something. or, 3.) Collect leads.

Stick to whichever goals you choose for the site and make them the focus of the entire site. Everything should be built around those goals.

2. Not Listing Contact Information on Every Page – online surfers are fickle and will click off a site in a heartbeat if they can’t find what they need. Provide contact info, links to disclaimer, privacy statement, shipping info, testimonials, and “about” on every page to make it ultra-simple to find everything they need.

3. Broken links – dead links (hyperlinks) that go to error pages are a sure sign that the site is not well maintained. If the business site isn’t well-maintained and can’t take care of itself – can they take care of you? There’s doubt at this point – don’t put doubt in your future customer’s heads. Fix all dead links to pages, images, videos, everything.

4. Old Info – There’s nothing worse that a customer getting excited about something, and taking the next step like writing you, calling, or ordering what they see on the site – and then being told it doesn’t exist. You just lied to your customer. You must keep your business information up to date and valid. Errors are the equivalent of lies. Don’t lie to your business customers.

5. Style Nightmare – use at the most – two different fonts on your business website. For quotes and other special text areas you could add another – like Courier New without it being too distracting. Use colors that blend together well. Use lots of white space. Use a plain background for your page – usually anything but is too distracting.

6. Orphaned Pages – every page on your business site needs a link back to the home page. There should be links to all your top information pages, and, if your contact information isn’t already on the page – links to that as well.

7. Disabling the Back Button – on occasion we still see it – webmasters breaking the back button. Don’t do it – ever! The back and forward buttons are basic to navigation – some still use them. Don’t mess with them.

8. Pop-Ups - in the past there was a time when every business site had pop-ups behind the window, in front of the window, on site exit – there were lots of them. Eventually it became so annoying that browsers started blocking them. There are some that STILL get through. Don’t add popups to your site. The only one that is acceptable is one you might see on this site- a special offer to grab an email subscription that will get you free and deeply discounted training courses. It pops slowly and fades over the page you’re on – gently – and, most users don’t find this that annoying. Most business sites are using this technology now (from Aweber.com).

9. Huge Index Pages – there are still a lot of surfers on connections slower than a T1. If your index page forces the load of a 1MB or larger FLASH or other media file before being able to see your site you’ll see a HUGE number of bounces from your home page. Keep your index page at 100KB or so, if you have large files – provide them as optional downloads on other pages deeper in the site – not as mandatory downloads on your index page.

10. Using Latest Technology – wait, let me explain. There are video codecs that few people have installed on their computers. It’s really annoying when I think I’m going to see a video and then I get the codec error message asking if I want to go look for it on the web. Heck no – I want to go to a different website that knows what they’re doing.

Your site must be recent, relevant, and yet not go overboard. If you think you’re cool because you use the latest technology – but only 2% of visitors to your site can use it too – you failed. Don’t force users to go download 3rd party software – most won’t.

5 Questions to Ask Your Business Website Developer

Before you hire your webmaster you’re going to have been shopping around. Here are 5 questions that matter and that should be a part of your interview process…
1. How many sites have you built, and can you show me 5 examples that are live?
Before you entrust someone with creating your business website they’ve had to have built 5 sites that are live by this point. The sites should be gone over with a fine tooth comb – as if they are your site that you just paid a lot of money for – because, soon – yours will be just like this. Does the person pay a lot of attention to detail on these sites?

2. What are your payment terms?
Our webmaster works on a monthly basis – we prepay for the month and he keeps track of hours publicly where we can see them and notes of all he has done over the month with a Google Doc online. It’s updated daily. We can see most of the results of what he’s done live on the site and question if anything seems wrong. Will your webmaster do the same for you?

Payment terms are very difficult to come to agreement on and is probably the single most destructive part of the entire process!

3. If you will go over on your hours estimate – how much notice will you give me, and, at what rate will it be charged?
When a developer gives you an estimate of hours it should be very close to reality. If the hours go over, probably he/she should eat the difference. If there was some add-on functionality you wanted after the original agreement was made then you can come up with a new agreement.

4. Do you do the needed graphics editing, video editing, and other media edits that might need done or do you outsource them?
Request to see samples of these too – editing graphics and video is much different than creating HTML code. Some business website developers are great at it – some, horrible. Find out before you hire.

5. Make it clear that you don’t want any links to any other sites coming from the pages on your site.
Many developers take it upon themselves to add hidden and sometimes brazen links to their own sites they have an interest in. You don’t want this as it devalues your site considerable in Google’s and possibly other search engine’s eyes.

Of course there are a whole lot of questions you’ll want to ask the future developer of your business website. One other subject you’ll definitely want to cover is SEO. You’ll want to find out if the person will optimize your site for SEO as your site is built. Building SEO into the design of the site as he/she goes is a smart way to develop so much of it doesn’t need to be done later.

If you need a web developer, the one that built our business websites might have some availability but you’ll have to check. Just let us know if you need a referral.