Recently, on a local Facebook page, I saw a post about a new website that had been launched.

Below the post were a few comments congratulating the site owner and the site builder, saying how great the website looked.

​Of course, as someone who builds websites, I took an interest and clicked on the link to the site.

Straight away I was 'blinded' by the overly-bright choice of colours along with little to no white space to help give the eyes a break.

Large, clear imagery was good, except for the pic of the business owner with his head cut off by the top edge of the screen.

Navigation to other website pages wasn't obvious, being a variation on the 'hamburger', which could confuse some elderly clients (and yes, this particular business owner's target market is likely to be at the more mature end of the scale).
 
What stood out next were solid blocks of text, paragraphs running together with no breaks, and only one heading at the top.

Humans are skim-readers, so why not make it nice and easy for people to scan through a website page to quickly find what they are looking for, hence good use of headings, subheadings, short paragraphs, and white space.
 
I forced myself to read the website content.  Chocka-block full of words like ‘us’, ‘we’ and ‘our’, means it didn’t focus on or talk directly to their ideal client.

With no page link available in the disguised hamburger, the only way to return to the Home page was to click on the logo, which isn't necessarily obvious to all age brackets.

The Home page was made up of only rotating banner images and to be honest, it was a bit like watching paint dry.  Rotating banners are almost always ignored by website visitors because they are akin to pop-up adverts, and apart from that, who has time to simply sit, watch, read and absorb every image and message that passes before their eyes?
 
Next, I took a look at the website of the company that built the website for their client.
 
Straight off, they claimed to be award-winning.  Fantastic!

I spent time looking through every inch of their website and couldn’t find any reference to any awards they had won. Which isn’t to say they hadn’t won any awards, but wouldn’t you make the most of your achievements and loudly blow your own trumpet if you were an award winner; never mind the credibility of backing up your claim?
 
The written content was along the same lines as the site they’d built for their client.
 
Page tabs were titled, ‘Who we are’, ‘What we do’, 'About Us', and 'Contact Us'.  Once again, the words being used were, ‘all about me’.

When it comes to website page tabs, trying to 'stand out from the crowd by doing something different', isn't likely to make your website visitor’s life any easier.  Sometimes following the norm is okay because it actually works.  Using words that are clear and obvious, like ‘About’, 'Products', 'Services', and 'Contact', are effective in helping your website visitors quickly find what they are looking for.
 
Solid blocks of text - which were again, full of ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘our’ wording – appeared overwhelming and difficult to read.
 
It could be that the text is 'keyword' loaded for SEO robots, however, it's important to remember that real people visit websites and business will certainly be lost when a website doesn’t resonate with its potential customers.

I really feel for business owners who spend good money with a city-slick website company who doesn’t ‘get’ how important it is to build a website for that business's customers. 

Of course, website visitors want to know about your company, but all anyone really wants to know when they visit your website is, ‘What’s in it for me?’, ‘What can I get from you to make my world a better place?’, and ‘why should I buy from you when I could buy from someone else?’

In conclusion, take a good look at your website and ask yourself:  "Does my website 'get' my clients?"