Keeping Your Site CurrentWritten by Jeff Colburn
It's imperative that your website's information be current. This can prevent you from many problems with your clients.If you have anything on your site that's date sensitive, such as a sale, promotion, coupon or similar items that have expiration dates, then remove them when they expire. I had a friend who used her website to advertise a sale she was having at her store. The ad filled one entire page. Well, about six months after sale had ended I went to her site and found sale still listed. She did have an expiration date, which was a good idea, but also caused some problems. By leaving this expired ad up it caused some problems with a few clients. Some people came to her store expecting discount mentioned in ad, and became upset when they found out sale was over. Some people became so upset that she gave them discount anyway. While this solved immediate problem, she still had unhappy customers. These customers no doubt told all their friends about unprofessional way store was run. There's no way to prove it, but I'm sure she lost sales from these unhappy customers spreading their unfortunate experience. Also, you have people coming in that when they find sale has ended feel cheated, stupid (Jeez, I didn't notice expiration date), embarrassed, and all around unhappy. They then try to funnel all of these negative emotions onto storeowner, or whoever happens to be behind counter. Now you have owner and employees feeling unhappy. It goes on and on. All because owner didn't remove page or update it with something like, "I want to thank everyone who made sale such a success. Keep checking back to see when our next sale will happen." Making a simple change to one page like this would have prevented all of misunderstandings, made everyone happy and increased site traffic as people kept going back to sales page to see when next sale would be.
| | Inconsistent DesignWritten by Jeff Colburn
One problem I often see on websites is inconsistent design. This not only looks unprofessional, but it also makes a site difficult for visitors to use. I recently visited a site, and each page was so different from every other page that I thought I was being sent to different websites. I found it so disconcerting that I left site after going to three pages and have no plans to go back. Do you think I would every buy a product or service from this kind of site? Not likely.You want to make your site have a consistent design. By this I mean that all links and contact information should be in same place on every page. Each page should have same design and colors too. A minor change in color isn't really a problem, but be sure that it's necessary. A change in color or layout should have a definite purpose and not be done just because you feel like it or want to show people what a great website designer you are. Here are a few design tips to remember when creating a website. Don't use blinking text. Everyone hates it because it's so darned annoying. Don't use more than 3 font styles on a site. Ideally, you should use only one font for entire website. You can use a fancy font for your site title, but be sure to make it into a graphic, such as a JPEG file. If you use a fancy font, it must be on viewer's computer or it will be replaced by viewer's default font. Keep italic and bold to a minimum. Use bold to highlight something important on a page, but if you use it too often people will ignore it. Most people find italicized letters hard to read, so if you must use italic, do so sparingly.
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