There are a lot of ways to suck at using your website, but here are 16 that come to mind right now 🙂
1. Create a website, but don’t SEO any of the pages
Search Engine Optimization is pretty important for a website to be found. Using best practices when optimizing your pages is also very important, otherwise you end up doing more harm than good.
2. Use stock photos for your team photos
Having stock photos of people on your site will really hurt your credibility if you are hoping to make any kind of personal connection with your customers or build trust with them.
3. Don’t update your site. Ever.
Having a stagnant website will not help you in the search engine ranking and when people see your latest newsletter is 2 years out of date they will start to think that the information on your site is less credible.
4. Don’t make it easy for people to contact you
Hiding a contact page, not having a “send us a message” form, or having your phone number only on one page of your site makes it hard for people to contact you.
5. Make sure you don’t have a presence on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Google+ or any other relevant social media site that has to do with your business.
Being absent on the social media outlets make it hard for people to talk about you online. If people can easily talk about you or contact you through social media, it’s much easier to increase your brand awareness.
6. Don’t have any demo videos of your products
Customers are 85% more likely to purchase after watching a product video (eMarketer ).
7. Don’t have any testimonials on your site to legitimize what you do
If others are willing to endorse you, you must be able to do what you say you can do or provide what you say you can provide.
8. Be vague or incomplete in the descriptions of your services so people still have questions (because people can’t contact you anyways)
If the descriptions of what you do are not complete and you have people calling you to ask questions, it’s probably a better idea to add the answers to those questions as information on your site.
9. Load your pages with thousands of words of content that people won’t read.
People don’t read huge paragraphs (as a general rule), so being short yet informative is important. If your content is in it’s nature wordy, make sure you have it organized and broken up into sections.
10. Don’t have a call to actions on any of your pages
If you have valuable information on your site and no call-to-action to bring that visitor closer to purchasing or hiring you, you’re giving up customers.
11. Let someone who’s colour blind setup the color scheme for your site
It’s always hard to go to a site that looks bad and navigate around it. If your site has some off colour schemes, people will notice on a conscious level or a sub-conscious level.
12. Use blinking text
Everyone loves blinking text, right? Especially when it’s RED.
13. Put background music on your site that the visitor CAN’T TURN OFF!
Don’t you just love it when you go to a site and terrible music starts playing out your speakers and there is no button to turn it off?
14. Don’t add alt tags to any of your images
Search engines love to see textual information about what a picture is about.
15. Make it hard for people to share any of the content on our site with others
Sharing buttons, email links, or even a printer friendly version make it a lot easier for people to share your information to others.
16. Don’t have a blog that talks about what you are doing or what is important in your industry.
Having a blog helps you in several ways, but the most important are that they help your page rank in search engines and they show you are an authority on the topics you write about.