Short Sited – Is Your Web Page Letting You Down?

The website is your online home.

It’s the place where your branding rules above all else and you get the most wiggle room to make the best possible impression on your target market.

So, when the site doesn’t work as intended by your carefully made design choices, it’s all too easy to get frustrated. If your site is letting you down, these might be the culprits as to why it’s not striking the right chord with visitors.

 

It’s Inaccessible

It’s a problem that many sites have had over the past few years, but there are still some who are slow to catch onto it.

A growing amount of web browsing nowadays isn’t done on a laptop or desktop. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and even games consoles are being used to visit your website.

If you haven’t worked on creating a site that is responsive with the tips found here, you are immediately turning away a growing portion of your audience.

Accessibility is important to members of your target market with disabilities, too. Creating alternative content or page options for people with issues like color blindness, sight difficulty, or deafness can help you make a site more accessible to all.

 

Navigation is a Mess

The sitemap is something that needs to be checked on an almost constant basis.

For one, if you have too many options in the navigation bar, users won’t know which way to look and are more likely to just give up on it. But more important is the prevalence of dead pages on a website.

Tools like those found at this link make it easy to scan your site for dead pages.

If you rely on hosting content that often contains outbound links, then making sure that pages exist on the other side of those links are going to end the jarring effect of having your site lead to dead ends.

 

 

It’s Down to Often

The design is only as good as the infrastructure that holds it up.

As a business grows, so does the demands of the website. More content, more space being used, more intricate designs. The demand on one server can make sites load slower if not take them offline entirely.

Cloud options like those displayed here can offer a more reliable, more easily backed up alternative. But it’s important to keep an eye on the demands of your site and always check whether scaling it up and adding new content might necessitate moving to a different hosting package.

Making the change before you’re certain will cause a lot of headaches.

 

It’s Old News

It’s not as fundamental as the other points above, but if you want your site to be successful, it must keep up with the times.

New content, new branding, and new pages are essential if you want people to keep coming back to the site. Even if it’s the first visit, a site that looks dated represents to visitors a business that is dated, as well.

Creating a website isn’t something that’s ‘done when it’s done’. Treat it as another arm of the business, always evolving with the circumstances, always optimizing and cutting out the inefficiencies.