Does your Web site make any of these mistakes? Any of these mistakes will reduce your Web sales.
Web Marketing Mistakes
- Lack of valuable content. Without valuable content, there is no reason for visitors and buyers to return to your Web site.
- Missing or hard-to-find contact information.
- Trying to be everything to everyone instead of having a unique selling advantage.
- Not providing an online order form. Make it easy to buy from
you by providing several ordering options, including a secure online
order form, an 800 number, and a fax number.
- Not accepting credit cards. Offer several payment methods,
including major credit cards. The majority of sales will come from
online orders paid with credit cards. If you are not accepting credit
cards online via
a secured server, you will lose sales.
- Lack of keywords in your Web content, page titles, and description. This will result in poor search-engines positioning.
- Me-oriented content/copy vs. content that benefits the audience.
- Content to satisfy the ego of the company CEO, developer, designer, or programmer vs. customer-focused copy.
- Starting a page with "Welcome to my Home Page" instead of
providing a benefit-oriented headline. For example, "Eight Ways to
Boost Credibility and Online Sales."
- Faulty links.
- Slow-loading pages. Prospective buyers won't wait for your pages to load.
- Typos. You'll loose credibility.
- Splash or entry pages (home pages with animation) visitors
have to click on to enter your site instead of indicating what your
site is about.
- Frames can be hard to navigate. They are not supported by
older browsers, are difficult to bookmark, print, and are difficult to
index for search engines.
Web Design Mistakes
- Missing images.
- Underlined words/sentences that can be confused with links.
- Curly quotes, curly apostrophes, and other special characters
that are likely to be converted to some characters on some operating
systems.
- Pages that are wider than your visitors' computer monitors forcing visitors to scroll left to right.
- Background music on your home page. Visitors will be tired of
hearing your music the third time they return to your home page in one
session. Have a "Stop Music" button. If you are a musician and have
music on your site, make listening to the music optional.
- Annoying pop-up windows (a message window that obscures the
main page) that keeps coming up each time visitors return to the home
page.
- Flashing banners, animation, flashing scrolls, and features that can annoy visitors.
- Irritating and distracting messages in the browser status line.
- Blinking text that won't show in most browsers.
- Under construction pages. Put your pages up when they are ready.
- Blue background. Blue links, the stardard link color won't be visible on a blue background.
How user friendly is your Web site? Think like a prospective
buyer visiting your Web site for the first time. Your Web site will be
successful only if you provide what your customers needs.
Give a positive impression with your Web site. Ask for
feedback from a professional Web designer, customers, and business
associates. Correct the problems. It will pay off.
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