"What’s wrong with my website? I'm not getting any leads or selling my products!"
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| Bad Website? |
There are several areas to look at that might be hindering your site’s success. Below are some questions to ask yourself to evaluate your website:
Functionality
You need to first, make sure your website is not built in such a way as to prevent your intended clients from actually getting to your products? Things like missing or ineffectual navigation may be making it impossible or at least more difficult for your clients to make a purchase. - Do all your buttons and links work?
- Do you have working contact information listed?
- Do your forms work?
- Do you have links sending clients offsite, never to return?
Testing every aspect of your site will help insure that your users or potential clients won't run into any problems when trying to contact you or purchase your products.
Content
It's important to keep your site updated regularly with fresh content, so that people return to you as a source for your service/product. There is nothing worse than a stale, outdated site.
Evaluate your site's content to determine whether you are giving them enough information and making it easy for them to find that information? Efficient, well thought out navigation will give people an easy way to move around and get to your product, making it easier for them to purchase from you.
- Is your writing style accurate and concise?
- Have you proofread your site to eliminate typographical errors.
- Do you have full contact information on your site including phone/fax numbers, email addresses and address.
Use domain email accounts. Using free email accounts like Yahoo and Gmail yells unprofessional. Avoid this at all costs.
Design
Another area to consider is your design. You may need a more professional look and feel to your site. Many people think that just because they have a site up, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. The
message you are sending with your site could be saying, unprofessional,
unwelcome or just plain unappealing.
- Does your website look legitimate?
- Does your site look “homemade” with lots of flashing images, distracting graphics, clipart, scrolling text?
- Are your photos or artwork blurry or are they snapshots you took that don’t look professional?
A good first impression is key to
getting the potential customer to look further into your site.
Search Engine Friendliness
Something very important to consider is whether you could be blocking your ability to be listed by search engines. In order for the search engines to pick up your keywords you need to actually have text instead of images and it needs to be targeted towards what people are actually searching for. Don’t get me wrong; putting your site together for a successful online marketing campaign takes real skill and experience. However, there could be simple things that if corrected, can really help your visibility.
- Are you using an image based “splash” page, with little or not searchable text?
- Are you pulling content together with frames? Search engines can’t follow framed content.
- Are your headings images instead of text?
- Do you have a sitemap or at least an html footer with links to your main pages?
- Have you made any search engine marketing efforts? You need to educate yourself and get started in that direction.
Contact
Lastly, but certainly just as important as everything else, you must stay in contact with your clients and check your email frequently. Make sure your email address is set up correctly and that you don't miss your client’s efforts to communicate with you?
Many times our clients are ready to start up a new business and hope to “rake in the dough”, but they haven’t thought out who was actually going to check and receive the emails that would likely be generated by a successful online storefront.
These are just a few things to think about when diagnosing your website, If you’d like to get a custom review of your site, AWSP’s design specialists can review it for a small fee. If you decide you want AWSP to rebuild your site, or use them for an online marketing campaign they will deduct the website review fee from your final total cost.
