I know this seems elementary. I can’t help feeling like it needs to be gone over again, however! A friend asked me to look at a website recently, and I am going to use it as an example here without offering any info that could identify it.
I went to take a look at the site, and what I found dismayed me! It was clunky, hard to navigate, and there were several glaring errors that immediately jumped to the eye. If I had been searching for the type of products offered, I might have stayed for a minute or two and then gone elsewhere. It was hard to read and clumsy looking.
For starters, the home page was very crowded. The center contained a bunch of very small font crowded text which was a bulleted list of products they offer with short descriptions attached. This was littered with one word links, supposedly to other pages on the site. The verified secure payment information was wrapped around by this text, when it would have been better smaller and in the header or on one side, though still above the fold.
On the left were some nice ads, and below the fold were the month’s special deals, also nicely highlighted – I would rather have seen a nice introduction to the site along with more of these types of things, and definitely more white space! The two good things on the home page were a category box in the upper left, and a search box in the upper right.
Under the search box was a large box labeled ‘Sponsors’…which was conspicuously empty. They had filled part of it with a ‘Questions? Contact Us by Email or Phone’. Below that it offered a place to sign up, but you had to scroll down to see it. I was left wondering why they bothered to label the box ‘sponsors’!
On the left below the fold was a box with mixed info. The Privacy Notice and Conditions of Use were lumped in with Gift Certificates and Coupons and Discounts. I would have put the first two in the footer, and added the other to the category box, or had a special place by the subscription box to encourage sign up.
I had to look hard for the sitemap, which turned out to be in the footer, along with the ‘My Account‘ link (also bad placement) and the Home button (uh, we were home??!!). The site map was billed as being for my navigational assistance, but again, the type was too small, and it was confusing and not to the point. I had to click on a lot of things just to find out what they actually were, as the titles gave no clue.
The articles a few of the links went to were poorly written and punctuated. The links that pointed to them took you first to a blank page with the two articles offered in small print up in one corner. The other two links took you directly to the articles themselves, which were in stark white on black with no additional formatting, and one had multiple hard returns.
On the whole, I hope the site owner does something about it soon – they are doubtless losing traffic from people who are turned off by its appearance, and very little of the site has been properly optimized.
If this sounds like your site, don’t despair! Top tips on how to fix a site like this will be the subject of tomorrow’s post. I will recap and go over what a desirable home page and overall site should be both user friendly and optimized for search engine traffic.
Be on the lookout!
Tags: home page, site map, website setup