Take a good, hard look at your website. Compare it to some of your competitors, or some sites with similar goals.
Now ask yourself these questions:
- Would you hire you?
- What types of businesses/companies/organizations would be most likely to hire you?
- What emotion do you feel when looking at the site website?
- If you were a client, what advice would you give yourself?
If the answers to these questions don’t match up with your ideal answers, it’s time to get to work on making your website work for you! You can start by carving out a few hours this week to put some serious effort into removing these four common website mistakes that could be costing you clients!
Spelling/grammar mistakes
Spelling and grammar mistakes are totally unacceptable in website content. Readers may be willing to overlook spelling mistakes in informal settings, such as in text messages or on personal blogs, but typos on your corporate website can damage your credibility—and affect your bottom line. This is one of the quickest ways to appear less than professional. Sure, this may seem like a minor issue, but many people will leave a website and never return if they find too many spelling or grammar errors. It suggests poor attention to detail and lessens your credibility. Here are some tips to avoiding this mistake:
- Get another pair of eyes to review the content, especially if you’ve written it yourself. Another reviewer will likely spot something that you overlooked.
- After you’ve written the text, step away from your screen for a few minutes and review it again later with fresh eyes.
- Don’t rely only on the spell check feature in your word processing program—it won’t take into account the context of the whole sentence and may miss things like its and it’s and their, there, they’re.
Too many fonts
Different fonts project their own personalities, which can be helpful for branding your company; however, the rule of thumb for your entire website should be:
- One font for headings
- One font for content
- One font for quotes
That’s it. Take a look at your website, does the font change between the About Me page and the Services page? It shouldn’t. Consistency and readability are important to good design and too many font changes can distract and confuse the reader. So stick to the three-font rule, it will help you to get your point across in a clear and consistent way.
Hard-to-read text
According to Nielsen research, people rarely read web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. As a result, you need to make the information on your web site easy to read. Here are some tips on things to avoid when creating the content and layout or your webpage and how to fix these problems:
- Poor justification. As a rule you should avoid center-justified paragraphs at all costs!
- Long paragraphs. All you need to do to fix this is break them up so that you only focus on one idea per paragraph or write more concisely.
- Long lines of text across a screen. The key to fixing this is by using columns or skinnier paragraphs which make it easier for our eyes to follow the text.
- Fancy fonts. There’s a reason books aren’t written in script, it is too hard to read in large quantities, so, stick to using fancy fonts as a design element, not for important information.
- Poor contrast between the text and its background. This should be self explanatory.
Text as images
The biggest problem with displaying text as an image is that you get none of the benefits of SEO. SEO works by having search engines “crawl” through your text and pick up key words. If your text is in an image, they can’t do that. It’s true, sometimes text is more of a design element and the best way to achieve an impactful visual effect is by using text in an image but when you do this you should make sure you are using the image alt text function so that you don’t miss out search engines being able to understand the words contained in your image. The image alt text function is a perfect way to keep your images SEO friendly while still allowing you to create beautiful webpages with images.
Good luck. We hope these simple tips will help get you going in the right direction.
~ Bethany Howell, art director
image via Serge Kij on Flickr
