Is Your Website Putting People to Sleep?
October 30th 2013
It can be discouraging when a visitor to your website tells you, in no uncertain terms, that they find the site boring. It can also have a negative effect on their perception of the product that your site is showcasing, resulting in a lost business opportunity. In reality, the subject matter of many commercial websites, particularly those that feature complicated, technical or industrial goods and services can make it difficult for them to be interesting but there are several techniques that might be employed to highlight what is essentially an unexciting product in a way that does not put your site visitors to sleep.
Here are a few basic tips that may help keep the visitors to your website awake!
• Structure your site in a way that is pleasing to the eye. A website that is too regimented can lose the attention of a site user very quickly indeed. Employing interesting and varied layouts to the site’s pages will make it more likely that visitors will find it interesting to explore.
• Make sure that your site is different to that of your competitors. It is possible that your visitors will have been to a competing site already. They won’t want to see a repetition of the content of someone else’s site.
• Use original and eye-catching banners and logos that will attract the attention of the visitor immediately. First impressions are lasting and if the immediate reaction of a visitor to your site is positive, their interest is likely to remain throughout the rest of their time on the site.
• Use imaginative colours and mix them up a little. Too much dark content may turn many people off, whilst the same goes for too many white spaces.
• Create original, informative, non-repetitive content. Few things are more annoying or tedious to a site visitor than reading the same thing over and over again.
• Incorporate visual content into the site to keep the attention of your visitor. A variety of professionally produced and skilfully placed images, sliders, picture galleries and videos all combine to make your site more appealing.
• Add social media content to your site, with easy links to your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin and You Tube pages.
• Create a blog on your site so that your visitors are able to see new and different content whenever they visit it. The addition of a blog also has the additional benefit of attracting more visitors to the site.
• Think about adding a news feed to your site, so that your visitors can receive up to date news that is relevant to your particular industry and its products and services.
Summary
These tips by no means represent an exhaustive list of ways to avoid having a less than exciting website. When you are developing a new site or redeveloping an existing one, the essential thing is to work closely with an experienced web developer. Together, you and your website developer should envision the type of website that will attract your visitors. Using their experience and expertise, your website developers should then able to design and create a site that offers the best possible user-experience for your visitors – and keeps them awake!