Top Tips To Make Your Website Stick

Want To Know More About The Social Media Surgery ?

Lesley Morrissey (Expert in Readability from www.lesleywriter.com) was our guest speaker at last week’s Social Media Surgery .  A very enthusiastic audience were treated to a content rich talk on how to make a website stick – e.g. which is interesting and engaging enough for visitors to stick around and find out more.  A few volunteers submitted their websites for Lesley to evaluate in detail, which produced a lively discussion and lots of ideas.

Here Is A Short Summary

• Make it easy for visitors to navigate around your website.  Whether you use a horizontal or vertical navigation bar -  group your pages under familiar titles, rather than making them wade through a huge list
• Before you write any copy, put yourself in your customers shoes – and find out what their pains, challenges and desires are
• Go for good copy – rather than a huge picture on your home page.  Google likes copy which will make your page more easily searchable.
• Don’t try and be too clever with your copy – i.e. with long sentences full of jargon, technical stuff or long words.  Don’t make visitors think to hard or your will lose them in seconds
• Don’t give your page titles weird names – use familiar terms that people routinely understand (i.e. Home, Contact Us, About Us, Events)
• Frequent use of CAPITAL LETTERS throughout your copy isn’t generally a good idea, as this makes it hard going for people reading it
• Good websites should be viewable in different browsers, smaller screens and even iphones
• Be careful with using the word ‘we’.  As Lesley put’s it “Don’t ‘we’ all over your copy” make liberal use of the word ‘you’ instead.
• If your web designer loves using Flash and has an urge to over design your site - this could turn people off
• For examples of websites that don’t work visit www.webpagesthatsuck.com
• Videos should be in the control of the person watching them and shouldn’t automatically load.  For instance, if you’re viewing a video at work and it automatically loads – it could cause embarrassment and attract unwanted attention.  This won’t make you flavour of the month
• Reassure visitors who provide personal information,  that you take their privacy seriously and aren’t about to randomly spam them at every opportunity.  Include a strong statement to this effect…e.g. “We hate spam as much as you do…”

More information can be found by downloading Lesley’s Comprehensive Report “Website Usability and Readability” Visit her website here www.lesleywriter.com

If you’ve not been to The Social Media Surgery – you are welcome to come along and see for yourself what we get up to!  Its an informal networking event where you get to meet other business owners AND learn something new each month about Social Media and the Technology that goes with it.

And…it’s free! (And we’ve got chocolate biscuits…!). 

Register here

Warmest regards

Wendy