Using Flash on your homepage is just about the biggest mistake you can make in web design. Although Flash sites are often very sexy and have very good graphics, you have to consider what your visitors are searching for. People are looking for information not how good your web designer’s Flash skills are - give them what they are looking for.
Even though high speed connections are quite common, not everyone has them and by adding Flash you will make your site slow to load and risk a lot of visitors going elsewhere. Internet surfers are used to instant answers and don’t appreciate delays so why make them wait? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.
Don’t create your site with links to everything under the sun on each page like a catalog and you will avoid mistake number two. This is the “show them all you’ve got scenario” where website owners believe that if they display all of their offers they will make more sales. There is no evidence to support that this works.
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Research on Internet marketing has proven that having too many links to offers on a page will lead the visitor to purchase nothing in most cases. The problem here is that the visitor feels overwhelmed and looks for an escape route which normally means leaving your site. Categorizing your site so that it is easy for your visitors to find what you have to offer is a far better solution.
You want people searching on Bing, Google and Yahoo to be able to find your web site so not optimizing your site for this is mistake number three. Writing for visitors and not for search engines is a view held by many web design experts. It is true that your visitors should be your priority, but it is also fairly easy to optimize your content for the search engines as well.
The smart thing to do is to see what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for plumbers in London. Assume that most people are typing in “Plumber In London”. It’s then just a simple matter of optimizing your site for this search term. The term needs to appear in your title, in the main body of your content a number of times and in your site description. Search engines are just machines and they need all the help they can get in understanding what your web site is about.
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Putting too many graphics on your site is mistake number four. Lots of pictures will slow down your site and more importantly will provide a distraction to your visitors so they may end up leaving without taking the action that you want. Top search engines like Google are now cracking down on slow loading sites. You have seven seconds to interest your reader according to many online surveys. If your site takes longer than that to load they will hit the back button faster than you can say “too slow”.
Getting inexperienced people to create your site and its content is the fifth mistake. There is no point in producing a fancy looking web site that has a poor message and does not encourage your visitors to contact you, join your email marketing list or buy your products or services. Just let your web designer do what they are good at which is the design work while you or a hired copywriter produce the written content.
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