9. Don't know what the website is about
You land on a website and you have no idea what they do or sell. I see this all the time. Upon landing on a website, a user needs to know exactly what you do without reading or scrolling too much and should convery their message from the get go. Wording and images are everything.
10. No pricing for products/services
Now this one is a bit in the grey area for me. Sometimes you are looking for a product or service to buy online and there are no prices. This could be an intentional decision made by the shop owner or perhaps the business doesn't want their competitors to see their prices? I get it, but what about the user browsing your website? The problem is the customer browsing your online shop, would then need to contact you or physically go to your shop to find out the prices. By then you have probably lost the customer.
This is by no means always the case, but it gives you a pretty good example of how one element that is excluded can have a huge impact on sales. In this article I go through some interesting stories of how simple things had catastrophic consequences.
11. Not updating website blog/events/news pages
Many people opt to have an events/news/blog page on their web page. This can be an excellent stategy to boost your online presence. However, not keeping it updated is one of my pet peaves and is unfortuantly something I see a lot online.
Here's the scenario: new client comes along, wants a new website, gets all excited about having a new website built, they want an events page, news page, or a blog page on their website, you show and advise them how to do it, they blog consistently for a few weeks, and then never again.
My advice here is to realise that a website takes work to create and effort to maintain. If you are going to blog or have an events/news/blog page, make to sure be consistantly update it on a weekly or monthly basis and stick to it. Blogs/news pages or events pages are a lot of work. You don't want to be rushing to write or create something, just for the sake of being consistant and that yields no or very little value. Quality and consistancy are key here.
If you don't have the time, I would suggest hiring a content writer, or if you have staff who can write something valuable and of quality, ask them to write the articles or blogs for you. Content writers, on the other hand, are great because they can whip up something substancial fairly quickly while including all the necessary targeted keywords.
12. Difficult to read fonts
Becareful what font is being used on your website. Most of the time cursive and hand-drawn fonts are notoriously difficult to read online. Here are a few fonts to avoid online.
If you have a slither of doubt whether or not the font might be difficult to read, rather go for simple, clean, easy-to-read fonts that are well supported that are considered web safe fonts.
Conclusion:
This is by no means by no means a complete list of things to look out for on a website, but these are the most common issues I see when browsing different websites. Most of these issues are common sense and not diffiuclt to do or fix. If you pay attention to these issues you could greatly improve your attractiveness of your website, web traffic, its ranking on Google and the user experience.
