6 Things To Improve The Look and Feel of Your Web Site

Since rejoining John Thornhill on his Partnership To Success programme, I’ve been looking at a lot of other people’s blogs to both improve my commenting to create some valuable back links and to get some ideas for future posts of my own.

This has given me the opportunity to review a great number of blogs and to spot both good and bad examples of which six are discussed below.

BAD FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Many blogs I visited were so bad when they appeared on my screen, I wanted to move away immediately and I think there is a statistic that says 80% of viewers leave a site in the first 10 seconds after they land so you need to get all of the elements of your site to be of top quality or you will suffer the same fleeting visit.

Things that need to be top class and grab your viewer’s attention are good, strong headlines, a clean and complimentary colour palette across the pages, good quality images and, of course, excellent content that gives value to the reader. Perform badly on any of these and you will not see them for dust.

NO MOBILE OPTIMISATION

Another interesting statistic is that 60% of website visits these days are made from a mobile device as people look for information on the move so it is vitally important to ensure that your pages can be seen easily and clearly on mobile devices.

Most new pages in development now are optimised for mobiles, but it is worth checking not only on your own phone, but on other types in case something that is fine on, say, an IPhone looks a mess on a Samsung.

It may even be better, if you have the time and the money, to actually have a designated mobile version of your pages especially if the site was developed before the great surge in mobile use over the past few years.

CALL TO ACTION

Now there are two parts to this CTA (Call To Action) situation;

1. NO CLEAR AND OBVIOUS CTA
2. TOO MANY CTA’S ON EACH PAGE

For the first type, this can mean that the CTA is not there, is swamped by so much else on the page or there is no simple button with instruction like Click Here. It is probably best to have one clearly defined, obvious and specific CTA per page although this does not have to be the same CTA on each and every blog or page.

For the latter type of problem, some blogs I visited had as many as ten offers of various types on both sides of the content as well as above and below so you were spoilt for choice, if you could make up your mind which to click. You spent so much time deciding on which button to push that in the end you just give up and leave.

One very obvious way to highlight your key CTA is to make it bigger, bolder and brighter than everything else on the page so that the viewer’s eyes are drawn to it like a moth to a light and they see nothing else and make that all important click.

And if you do have a CTA, always make sure that it opens in another tab or window so that your original page is still open and active enabling them to come back much easier.

POOR COPY OR WEAK HEADLINES

The importance of your landing page cannot be stressed too highly and it is probably more important by far than any other page so, as I mentioned earlier, you have about 10 seconds to grab the viewer’s attention before they are off to another blog or web site.

So headlines like “Freddy Starr ate my hamster”, famous from many years ago, intrigue and draw in the readers and give you a fighting chance to keep them on there long enough to get your point across.

Although if they start to read your post and it is full of spelling mistakes, poor grammar and is downright boring then you have lost them and the chance of a click and/or a sale. So always read through and spell check your posts before posting.

IMAGE QUALITY

Another thing that helps you retain a viewer is a good quality image that relates in some way to the headline and there are many good sites available, pexels.com for one, where you can get high quality images for free and these brighten up any blog.

The splash of colour and the different media types help to make the viewer stay and start to read through your posting.

Even taking your own pictures for the real individual look can be a great way to give you images as long as you are a capable photographer and able to edit if necessary. Probably having your own pictures taken professionally is the ultimate goal, but even at the lower prices available today, this may be an expense too far.

NO TESTIMONIALS OR SOCIAL PROOF

When you start out, it can be difficult to show this type of endorsement, but as soon as you get one piece of positive feedback you should drop it into your blog.

If you are promoting an affiliate product, you could look for freelancers and send them a free copy of your product and ask them to give you a review as this would be an unbiased opinion that can be used on your blog.

I hope this is some assistance to you when you are looking at your blog’s performance and you are ablw to increase the look and feel and hence retain your viewers for a longer length of time and allow you to get you message across to them.

To your success

DaveT