Why web site mistakes cause web site problems

Many small business website owners believe that a beautiful web design will somehow impress and find new customers. They design a company website to look just like their brochures, newspaper and television ads and wonder why nobody comes to visit their beautiful web site! A very common mistake: Too many business owners get talked into beautiful website designs that do not represent or enhance their business image. Designing a business web site that is beautiful, functional and navigable will produce new customers and be profitable for years to come.

Many business web sites provide information to visitors only from the site owners' perspective. Websites answer visitor questions. Visitor questions need to have the highest priority in your design decisions. This website was designed and written, to provide easy to understand business website design and search engine optimization information for business website owners, proposed or existing sites. Our site not intended to provide is technical, how to information to website designers, even though it probably does! Our goal, is to provide the business website shopper with all the necessary information to make an informed decision. Business websites must provide good information to be credible.

A common visitor complaint about most poorly designed business websites: How do we find more information, from here? Visitors will quickly leave a website when they can't the find the business information that they came for. If your web site's main menu does not provide good links to all your information pages, you need to provide a good Site Map. Usability is the key to every successful business web site. Good page titles help visitors and search engines to decide where to visit next. Why have a link to your Home Page, on your Home page?

People love pictures. A great deal of emotional response can be generated by colors and appropriate pictures. Unfortunately, search engines are simply computer programs that are cold, emotionless creatures, driven by programming logic alone. They can't see the beautiful pictures! Search engine robots can only read text. It's easy to fill a web page with pictures and still have a blank web page!

The more sophisticated the search engine, the more important valid web pages on your website becomes. Every search engine organization is working to constantly improve the quality of their search results. Websites that have too many errors in their markup are already being de-indexed and dropped from their databases. In the future, poor quality invalid websites could lose ranking position in dramatic fashion. A validated website is very simple for search engines to crawl, index and rank. Valid markup allows every page to display correctly on every browser.

Focusing detailed information about specific aspects of your business on specific web pages (dedicated to that subject only), will provide valuable information to each visitor. Any website that tries to be all things, to all people will fail to achieve a great search engine ranking. Each visitor is searching for specific answers, to specific questions. Each web page on your site should provide detailed answers about only one aspect of your business, linked to other important web pages that provide expanded explanations of similar or related topics.

An accessible web site design is simply following the goals of the world wide web. Although information on every business website should be fully accessible to people with disabilities, most website designers ignore this important website component. For a business website owner, an accessible website design presents an image of respect for all their visitors' needs. The 10 percent of website visitors who require accessible website features to access and navigate your site, will certainly appreciate the exceptional customer service values you portray by providing easy navigation access. A user friendly web site is accessible.

Every web site visitor comes to your site the first time for only one reason; to find free information! Information to answer an important question. Information about How to solve a problem. Information about where to find a good link to even more information! It's always about finding the right business information. If your site provides the best answers, they will probably come back for more information. Visitors almost never come to admire your beautiful website!

Tim Parry in multichannelmerchant.com May/06

A favorable mention on someone's blog can be a boon to your business. But negative feedback on another blog can be more detrimental than you could imagine. And you may not even know that you're being openly criticized, or flamed, online.

by Olivier Thereaux and Susan Lesch (w3.org)

A certain trend among designers, believing that small text gives a Web page a sleek appearance and provides more space per page for actual content, sometimes results in the use of unreasonably small font sizes.

There are 216 web safe colors. Using colors that are not on the list may cause your web pages to render differently in different browsers. Internet Explorer is not the only web browser. Remember, there are definite emotional responses to specific colors. Choosing the right colors for your business type can help to create instant credibility for your site.

Flash Intro Pages can be VERY annoying to your visitors! Using a flash intro page can cause visitors to quickly escape from your site. Flash intro pages should ALWAYS provide a bypass link to allow your visitor to skip the intro. If they return, they probably don't want to wait for you to dazzle them, again! Flash animation and Shockwave movies are only impressive, the first time you see them. Flash intro pages should be used with caution, or avoided completely.

Good page titles are important to every web page on every web site. This element is the single most often overlooked or abused component of web site design. Page titles tell everyone what important information the page contains. In html, the <title> tag tells a computer's web browser to display the text as the document title, usually at the top of your monitor screen. Good titles provide some interesting information about the page subject. About us and who we are, are common title mistakes.

To make good web site design decisions, you need to find good information. Terminology can be confusing to anyone not familiar with a specific industry. We encourage every website shopper to familiarize themselves with the terminology used to describe website design, optimizing and publishing before you hire anyone. Understanding an industry's terminology is always necessary, to make informed buying decisions. Sadly, it appears that some web site design firms intentionally use technical web site terminology to impress, rather than inform their customers. Good business web sites provide good business information.

Simple words, written on a web page. Free information is what every business site is all about. The words that are written directly on the web page, are all that describe the information content to both search engines and your human visitors as well. Your new customers are already trying to find business information sites!