Battle of the Bulge

Convert More with Less

It's January and we’re getting the normal onslaught of advertising that's aimed at one way or another to lose weight. This isn't one of them. Yes, the topic suggests Battle of the Bulge, but I'm referring to your website, not your waistline.

Or more to the meat of it, the clutter of your website.

Websites gradually tend to collect more and more information. This is great – great for search engines (spider food) and great for visitors. The more information, the better.

So why the "bulge?”

As websites collect more and more information, website owners tend to neglect keeping the site within the original design and organization. This is the double edged sword of Content Management Systems (like our own CopyWrite CMS system).

While clients need the ability to create and manage their own content, it sometimes makes the site very cluttered.

Nothing drives designers crazier than to see copy (text) that's been forced into a different font (such as comic sans) than the site was originally designed to use. Or to see a 4 megapixel image in an area that designed to hold a 30 Kb file.

The most important thing to understand about these examples, besides causing a designer to cringe, is that these misguided entries drive people away from your website. In the search world, this is known as "bounces.”

Let's look at our examples. If you use Comic Sans font, for example, on a website created with Verdana, the Comic Sans text stands out and looks very unprofessional. It's kind of like wearing a clown nose and wig to a formal dinner. It attracts strange looks causes mistrust with your site visitors.

In the on-line world this attempt at variety or creativity is horrible for a website and will lead to a high bounce rate.

Our other example with the 4 megapixel image makes people leave your site, also. It simply takes too long to load. Even with a super fast connection (like 10 Mbps, or Mega bits per second) a 4 megapixel image takes up to 4 minutes to finish loading.

According to a ton of on-line research, you have 30 seconds to keep somebody on your website when they first click on it. I feel it's closer to 10-15 seconds, as people's attention spans are getting shorter, not longer.

The rule of thumb our designers follow is to design a website (the entire site) that fits within 100Kb. So if your photo file is 4 MB, then that's 40 times larger than the entire site should ever be.

So How Do We UN-clutter?

That's the easy (or hard) part, depending on your perspective. If images and download speed are keeping visitors away, then that's easy to fix. Just use something like Photoshop Elements ($79) to downsize and compress images.

A good rule of thumb: no bigger than 50-75 Kb for large images, and no bigger than 25 Kb for images that are better suited as small thumbnail images.(You can easily set thumbnails to appear as larger images by clicking on them.)

If the problem is font choice, that's also an easy fix. Just take all of the font tags out in the WYSIWYG editor. Most editors (like our own CopyWrite CMS) come with a format clean up button that will remove all formatting from a certain element. If you struggle with this, just call us and we’ll walk you through it.

If the site just looks old or you can't figure it out, the best advice I can give is to ask somebody close to you if your site looks professional.

Most people  will try to be polite, so just tell them to be straight up with you. If you get a "Well...(long pause) " that's a good sign something needs to change.

If it's something you can't fix on your own, then please contact us at www.webunlimited.com.

My rule of thumb: if your site is more than two years old, it's time for a facelift and reorganization. We do this with many of our clients, usually at a lot less expense than the original design.

This article wasn't really aimed at becoming a sales pitch, so I'll leave you with one thought:

Your website's purpose is to convert a visitor into a customer. It's that simple. It might be to sell something online, or get the visitor to call you, or simply get people into the doors of your business.

Whatever the goal, your site serves as an employee that works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If that employee looks disheveled and unkempt, doesn't it go to reason that it will drive people from your business?

Take measures to drive them back to you, not away.