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Give Your Website A Second Chance By Eliminating These 5 Blunders

2017-03-30by Sara Stringer

It is among all things possible that your website is not performing as expected through no fault of your own. Even when you do everything right, success is not assured. Building it is no guarantee that they will come.

Right now, there are over 1.1 billion active websites, and counting. The number seems to be increasing by about 3 per second. That’s roughly 1 website for every 7 people on earth, including those who have no access to electricity and computers. As they come online, that number will only go up.

The chances that someone will just stumble across your perfect website by chance is diminishingly small, and getting smaller, quite literally, by the second. But there is an even greater chance that your website is not perfect. You can follow conventional web design wisdom and still make blunders. So before scrapping all of your website efforts, check for, and eliminate these common blunders:

1. Using a Generic Design for a Specific Need

Companies like Hilton Head web design specialize in helping people avoid the pitfall of using a generic design for a specific need. The only truly generic design is a blank page. Once you write one word of text, post one image, or include one splash of color, the design is no longer generic.

If you are offering financial services, it would be a grave mistake to offer a generic website that looks like it was designed by Fisher-Price. If you are a photographer who wants to showcase her work, you don’t want a website that is more suited for a text-heavy blog.

It may be necessary to hire a consultant to help you. But the first thing you should check for is whether or not your web design is in keeping with the goals of your site. There is a good chance that it isn’t.

2. Failure to Make Your Site Mobile Responsive

Responsive website design, (RDW) is all about creating a better experience for end users on smaller screens such as those found on compact laptops, tablets, and especially smartphones. The web has to work well on all of these devices, and every size in between.

It is not just size. It is also interface. There is a huge difference between accessing the web via a keyboard and mouse, and using the tip of a finger. There are a lot of myths about responsive web design. But one fact is certain: if you are not using it, you are committing a fatal blunder.

3. Allowing Ad Revenue to Become the Most Important Thing

When pleasing advertisers becomes more important than your primary reason for starting the site, you should shut down your site and start again. The reason is that chasing ad revenue causes compromises that are so user-hostile, your site may be doing harm to the person who happens upon it.

Rather than useful content, you end up serving intrusive ads, page takeovers, virus injectors, battery and ram hogs, spyware, malware, and every kind of malicious trojan, all in the name of making an extra dollar of ad revenue. Burn such a site to the ground and start afresh.

4. Inaccessible

One of the consequences of ad-heavy sites is the heavy use of flash, and other harmful technologies. One of the side-effects of that is your site will be less accessible to the blind and visually impaired. You will rely on graphics elements when text would be better. You will have a lot of fix-print elements where a resizeable text would be easier. Replace inaccessible elements with more accessible elements.

5. Poor Link Strategy

Unless you are happy being one website out of a billion, you are going to need link partners. There is a good chance that most of what you know about linking is wrong. There are more ways to violate Google’s back linking guidelines than there are to do it right. This is another place where getting a professional auditor is advised.

In most cases, you don’t have to start all over. You can give your website a makeover that will make it look and perform like new.

 


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Sara Stringer

Sara is an author who covers a wide spectrum of topics.

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