When I review people’s websites as part of my website mentoring service, I seem to come across certain problems time and time again. So I’ve compiled all of the commonly made mistakes into a single article. I bet that most of you are making at least 1 mistake on this list!

Initial Impact

These are issues relating to a website when you visit a website for the first time.

1. Purpose of website not obvious

When you first see a webpage, you want visitors to know what the website is about in the first 10 seconds or so. If the website appears irrelevant (even though it is actually relevant) to the visitor, then they will leave. Give the user cues such as related images or short introductory paragraphs of text.

2. Website appears unfinished

If a website looks as if it’s incomplete, you’re giving your visitors a negative impression, particularly if you run a service or business. An incomplete website can imply a lazy or poor service, as if you can’t look after your website, how can you be expected to look after your customers?

3. Websites that take too long to load (if at all)

You should aim to have your website loading within 6 seconds. The faster the better. However, if your website doesn’t load at all, or it takes far too long, you’ll probably lose visitors and they are unlikely to return.

4. Shockwave Flash intro pages

Flash intro pages are very old-fashioned now, where most users will click on the skip link or leave straight away. From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) perspective, you want your home page to have your most important information, not a flash intro which has little benefit when it comes to search engines.

5. Website breaks in major web browsers

Make sure your website works in the major browsers, including IE (6, 7, 8), Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. Significant issues due to using one of those web browsers will typically not be tolerated by visitors (such as broken layouts, no navigation functionality, etc).

6. Lack of a domain name

Don’t rely on free web hosting for your website address. e.g. mysite.freehosting.com looks very unprofessional. Buy a domain name, they start at around £7 for 2 years for a .co.uk domain.

7. Audio that plays when you visit a website

Any kind of audio that plays when you visit a website I feel is tacky. I don’t like surprises, and that counts as a surprise. It’s annoying at any rate.

Bad design

What constitutes a good or bad design is highly subjective, however, there are a few things that will definitely annoy users. Here are some of the worst offenders.

8. Poor choice of colours

Eye-bleeding bright colours or unreadable text makes using your website particularly difficult to read. Make life easy for your readers by giving your colour scheme a contrasting, yet pleasant feel.

9. Poor site navigation

If a visitor cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave. Make it as simple as possible to find different pages on the website, using a sensible menu and navigation layout.

10. Using Frames

Using HTML frames is an old-fashioned and troublesome website technique. They can damage a user’s experience, and additionally can cause havoc with a web browser’s next/previous navigation buttons.

11. Images that are too small

If you have images that contain vital information or that demonstrate your product (or services), then users should be able to zoom in or view a larger version of an image. I’ve seen far too many online shops where the product image is 125px x 125px where you can’t even see the product. How can you convince your customers to buy something if they can’t even see what they are buying?

12. Popup Adverts

Just say no! Popup adverts annoy users and are associated with spyware. Avoid at all costs.

13. No about page

Visitors these days often like to read about a company or a website to get an idea of what the website is all about. The about page is a great way to explain the origins of a business or a website. You can go a little further by having photos of people involve with a company or website. This helps remind visitors that there are real people behind a website, which also helps with trust.

14. No contact page

You want visitors to get in touch, so add a postal address, email contact form, email address, telephone number, etc. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you. Adding a registered business address adds a degree of trust for online shops too.

15. No calls to action

You want visitors to do something, such as register for an account, buy something, sign up to a newsletter, call you, etc. Therefore tell them! Have strong calls to action to encourage your visitors to do what you want.

16. Over-reliance on Javascript or Flash

Javascript and Flash should only be used on a website to improve the user experience, not to replace basic functionality such as links or site navigation. Additionally, some users disable Javascript or block Flash, so your website should gracefully degrade so that those visitors can still use your website.

17. Visible script errors

Script errors do occur on occasion, however script error messages that are visible to the user do give your visitors a negative impression.

Website content

The information and ‘stuff’ on a website is what you want your visitors to see and engage with. So here are a few common issues relating to the content on websites.

18. Broken links and images

Checking images is pretty quick for a website, as it’s pretty obvious if something is missing. Therefore there is no excuse. Broken links are harder to find, but there are plenty of free tools to help you. The last thing any visitor wants to see is a 404 – Page Not Found message. Check your most important links manually, e.g. Twitter, Newsletter Signups and RSS feed links.

19. Lack of text on the website

Whatever you offer, you need to have some text on your website that describes your product/service/club, etc. Lots of relevant and useful textual content on your website will also help with search engine rankings. This is because potential visitors will type a range of generic and long-tail keyword phrases into search engines to find websites like yours. Lots of useful text-based content increases the chance that potential visitors will find you via the search engines.

20. Sign up before you can read anything

I’ve noticed a few websites now that require you to register before you read anything. Getting a visitor to create an account is a significant request compared to just reading your website. I would never sign up to a website unless I knew what I was going to get, so you should have at least some content on your website that doesn’t require users to create an account first.

21. Advertising – too much or unrelated

Advertising on a website is absolutely fine if done correctly. Beware of having irrelevant adverts on your website, particularly adverts that are known to be annoying or have a bad reputation. Also, don’t plaster your website with adverts, keep it balanced.

22. Avoid animated GIFS

Animated GIFs are so 1990s. Avoid them where possible. They do look tacky, and they can distract your users from looking at the good parts of your website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a very large topic, however, here are a few obvious mistakes that I frequently see on websites I review.

23. Not using the <title> tags correctly

Make sure you use the HTML <title> tags on every page to describe what’s on that page. Don’t keyword stuff, but the title should describe what that page is about. What’s in the <title> tags is very important from an SEO perspective because they have a strong weighting in the rankings. Additionally, if someone bookmarks one of your web pages, it reminds them of what is in that web page.

24. No search engine friendly URLs

Important keywords in your URL structure can help benefit your search engine rankings. Additionally, page titles that appear in URLs give prospective visitors a hint to what the article contains just from the URL alone. e.g. www.mywebsite.com/?p=344 is not descriptive, however, www.mywebsite.com/how-to-grow-your-business is much more descriptive and gives users an idea what to expect if they click on that link.

25. Click HERE links

The text that is used for text links is a small but still an important ranking factor for search engines. Therefore avoid having links that look like “Click here for the download”. Try using something like “Please sign up to download the free business worksheet“. (Please note, those links just go to my home page and are for illustration only).

Your pet hates?

I hope that you found those tips useful. Please let me know what your pet hates are in the comments below!

Thank You

The following people helped me write this article by giving me a few more ideas, so I’d like to say thank you to them all.

• http://www.twitter.com/wonder_lander (Jon Cook)
• http://www.twitter.com/Tintop (John Edwards)
• http://www.twitter.com/Noidontdrinktea (Fee Fee)
• http://www.twitter.com/The_Landlord (The Landlord)
• http://www.twitter.com/chimpdonk (Crispin Read)

In an attempt to boost my commissions via affiliates on my eco-gadget review site EnviroGadget, I wanted to see if I could improve the number of visitors clicking through to the merchant website. I don’t get a commission for all of the products I review on EnviroGadget. However, for the products I do earn a commission, I wanted to make sure that I was getting as many people clicking through my affiliate links as possible.

Therefore I decided to run some experiments with different types of button. Just by changing the colour of a button and changing its text a little, I found a way to triple my click-through rates (CTRs)! Yep, you read that right, triple! Read on to find out how.

The Technology

I have some relatively complex code that I’ve written to handle the affiliate tracking, and it’s beyond the scope of this article to explain it in detail. However, I’ll cover the basics. My affiliate tracking code allows me to create a URL like this:

http://www.envirogadget.com/recommends/a-solar-powered-gadget/g_bn

When that URL is clicked, it redirects the user to the product page on the merchants website, dropping a cookie to ensure that if the user makes a purchase on that website, I get a commission.

The ‘a-solar-powered-gadget‘ part of the URL is the code for a particular product. The ‘recommends‘ part of the URL tells a script on EnviroGadget to redirect a user to a product page using the product code I just mentioned.

The ‘g_bn‘ part of the URL is an example of a special tag that I can use for additional tracking. So I could link to a product using the URL above using many different coloured buttons. If I used a different tag for each different button, it means I can track how many times each button can get clicked. This is what I used to test the different buttons in the experiments below.

Experiment 1 – The Hypothesis

All my affiliate buttons started off being a green Buy Now button. However, I wondered if a contrasting button colour would out-perform my green button (especially as the rest of the site is themed with green). I also wanted to test different button texts too, just too see if the wording had any effect.

Hypothesis 1:

“I expect contrasting blue buttons to outperform the more subtle orange buttons on click through rates”.

Hypothesis 2:

“I expect that the less imperative More Info buttons would outperform the stronger Buy Now buttons”.

Experiment 1 – The Results Data

Button Experiment 1 - Orange and Blue

Notes: I was told that “Shop Now” was a good button text to use, so I wanted to test that. For some reason, I didn’t use green in the first experiment. Can’t remember why!

Experiment 1 – Conclusion

From the results, it’s clear that my initial theories were completely wrong!

So the results show that the orange buttons considerably outperformed the blue buttons. The orange Shop Now button more than doubles the CTR compared to the blue button. Perhaps this has something to do with the emotive effect of colours, e.g. warm v.s. cold colours. Even still, the orange buttons are harder to see with a green background, and blue is more of a contrast to green.

The results show that More Info is a waste of time, performing the worst overall. However, Shop Now is the strongest performing text, with Buy Now being a close second.

Based on these results, I realised I needed to test some more combinations as my assumptions were very wrong.

Experiment 2 – The Hypothesis

Following on from the first experiment, I thought it would be wise to compare the performance of my existing green Buy Now button against orange buttons. I also wanted to test red against orange and green to see if it had any significant impact.

Hypothesis 3:

“I expect that the brighter red buttons will outperform the green and orange buttons, with the red Shop Now button being the best button for the highest CTR “.

Experiment 2 – The Results Data

Button Test 2 - Red, Orange and Green

Experiment 2 – Conclusion

I had clearly learnt something from the first experiment, and my theory was spot on correct in the second experiment. However, the range of values I obtained was very interesting.

The results showed that using a red Shop Now button (21% of clicks), rather than a green Buy Now button (7% of clicks), there’s a 3-fold increase in clicks through to the merchant website!

In general, red outperforms orange and green. The Buy Now and Shop Now are strong call-to-actions, which resulted in a high CTR compared to Buy This. I’ve not been able to come up with a reasonable explanation for the poor performance of the Buy This button text.

Overall Conclusion

From running these experiments, I learnt 3 things. These 3 lessons are:

• Check your assumptions – I was making incorrect assumptions, so testing my assumptions really paid off. I spotted my mistakes.
• Experiment and track everything – When you do test something, collect as much data as possible so you can analyse it.
• No-one will do it for you – I had to run my own experiments to learn my own lessons. Don’t rely on my data either, test your sites yourself too!

I hope you enjoyed the article and that it motivated you to run your own tests. If you like the pretty graphs, please leave a nice comment, as they took me ages to create!

Update – 30th Sept 2009

John Andrews wrote a great complement to this article on Always Be Link Building. John quite rightly emphasises the point that button colours, and therefore their respective click-through rates, are very specific to a website and its design. So just to re-iterate, test different button combinations yourself, don’t rely on my data alone!

I’ve recently launched a platform called BlogSynergy which allows you to find host blogs who are looking for guest bloggers, in addition to allowing you to advertise your blog to look for guest writers. I was a fan of guest blogging long before I created BlogSynergy, and the platform is designed to make it as easy as possible to get involved with guest blogging.

In this article, I give a concrete example of what guest blogging is about, followed by 10 great reasons why you should be guest blogging.

Example – Home Renovation and DIY Blog

You run a blog about home renovations and do-it-yourself (DIY) tips. You write great articles, but sometimes you just can’t think of something to write about. To ensure you don’t lose any visitors, you look to find a guest writer in an area related to your own.

You find a writer who writes a detailed article about something related to DIY solar-panel installation. Because they’re an expert in solar-panels and plumbing, you get a very informative article for your readers. So your regular readers get some variety, you get a break from writing fresh and interesting content, and the writer gets to build their reputation.

It’s pretty common for the writer to get a couple of links back to their website in return. The writer’s website might be their company website, or it might be a blog. Therefore the writer gets a few visitors and a backlink to their website. No money changes hands, and everyone benefits.

Now on to a few more great reasons why guest blogging is so great.

1. Free, fresh and interesting content

The primary benefit for the host blog is that they get fresh content for their website. Anyone who runs a blog knows that its hard work coming up with unique and interesting content on a regular basis. Therefore guest blogging helps you reduce your workload a little.

2. It’s a great link building technique

One of the core ways of improving your rankings in the search engines is with relevant links from quality websites. Since links, quality and relevance are fundamental to guest blogging, you cover all of those requirements at the outset.

3. You find others in your community

Since you’re engaging with other readers and blog owners, you can expand your community of friends and contacts around your subject matter. This can lead to support, ideas and potentially further guest blogging opportunities.

4. Writers can tackle a different topic or writing style

With any blog, your readers will be used to a certain style of writing, and therefore expect articles in a certain way. By guest blogging, you can write about slightly different topics you wouldn’t usually cover on your own blog, or adopt a style you wouldn’t usually take. This can be a great opportunity to experiment with a new technique or give yourself some variety.

5. Build your reputation

When you pay for someone’s services or products, you usually do so because you trust that business or person. By guest blogging, you can build your reputation in that community, boosting the profile of your own personal brand and/or that of your business. If you or your company is well known, it’s usually the case that its more trusted.

6. Increased visitor traffic

Since the writer get a couple of links back to their website, they’re usually gain some extra visitors too, particularly if the article was really interesting. Additionally, I encourage the writer to advertise the article they wrote on social media, so that the host blog gets some extra visitors too.

7. Future potential reciprocation

Once you’ve written for a guest blog, you might want to offer people the opportunity to write a guest article for you too. You can ask the owner of the blog you wrote for, as well as other readers of that host blog. Either way, it’s pretty simple to advertise that you’re after guest articles too.

8. Engage with new people

Once you’ve written your article, respond to the comments and feedback you get on the guest article. Very few people actually leave comments and feedback, so appreciate them. You can get involved in interesting conversations, do more networking and possibly earn some business from it. People are more likely to visit the website of someone they engage with, as they want to learn more about you or what you do.

9. Build your reputation without a blog

Guest blogging allows you to engage with a community without needing a blog or website. Sure, having a website or blog may help, but you can just as easily promote your LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter profile instead of a website. Running a blog is hard work, but that doesn’t mean you need to run one to take advantage of guest blogging opportunities.

10. Grow your résumé or CV

If you’re applying for a job that involves writing, editing or similar work, then you can build some relevant experience by writing guest articles. You can then add examples of your work to your résumé (Curriculum Vitae in the UK). Your prospective boss can then also gauge the quality of your work by looking at the feedback that the article has generated.

Any more?

Those are my 10 great reasons for guest blogging. Have anything else to add?

If you want to get started with guest blogging, please sign up to BlogSynergy. BlogSynergy is currently free whilst its in beta (and there will be a free basic account in the future too).

Artiseer Startup Screen

This article is all about a template design tool called Artisteer. Artisteer is a essentially a design application that allows you to create your own great looking templates that can be used with Joomla, Drupal and WordPress without needing any technical skills or needing to know how to use Photoshop or Dreamweaver.

When you’re creating lots of websites, coming up with unique designs all the time is hard work, particularly if you’re not artistic. Artisteer comes with loads of ready-made elements which you can blend together to create a great looking and unique theme. So for plenty more compelling reasons why its worth using Artisteer, keep reading!

The Suggest Design Feature

The most useful part of Artisteer is that you can ask the software to suggest ideas for you. When you first open the Artisteer application, you’ll be presented with an initial design. If you look at the toolbar, you’ll see a Suggest Design button. Each time you click the Suggest Design button, Artisteer will generate a completely unique design with a random layout, background, header, colour scheme, menu, and more.

The Ideas Toolbar

If you only want inspiration on just a single element, such as the header, then you just click on the Suggest Header, or Suggest Colour button to choose a random colour scheme. You can get a suggestion on virtually any part of the design just by clicking on one of the suggest buttons.

Initial Design

Random Header

Random Colour

Random Sheet, Colour and Layout

Exporting Artisteer Designs

Once you’ve created your ideal design, you can export your template into a WordPress theme, Joomla template, Drupal template, ASP.NET application, or CodeCharge Studio. You can also export your template into standard HTML.

For example, if you have Joomla and WordPress running on the same website, where Joomla is the main website and WordPress is used for the blog aspect, then you can get exactly the same look and feel on both websites without having to spend hours copying the template from one to the other.

Quick Design Tweaks

If you find you need to tweak an aspect of the design, such as the colour scheme, then it’s really quick to do so. You just adjust the colours in the scheme’s palette and apply the change to the whole design. Simple!

Making structural changes to a design, such as the column layout can easily consume lots of time. The advantage with Artisteer is that you can change the layout of the design within seconds. If you make a change and hate it, you can simply click the Undo button to revert the change. I find that Artisteer is great for experimenting with layout ideas without spending ages doing the HTML and CSS code to try it out.

Resale Rights

What’s really interesting about the Artisteer software is that you have resale rights on all the generated templates (except for the photos used as foreground images in the header). So you are free to distribute the templates as you wish, giving them away or charging money for them!

Just to clarify, you are allowed to use the foreground images on any of your own sites or sites you create for your customers and clients. The licensing on the images just means you can’t redistribute them.

Mac OS X Support

Currently the Artisteer software is supported on Microsoft Windows only. However, there’s already a mature beta of Artisteer for Mac OS X that exists, and any licence you purchase for the Windows version will be valid for the Mac version too. I expect that a supported release of the Mac OS X version will be available late 2009.

Conclusion

If you create lots of websites, then you’ll find Artisteer an affordable way to create lots of unique templates. Buying premium templates and themes can quickly add up to a lot of money. Artisteer costs just $49.95 for the basic version, and $129.95 for the standard version (the latter is what I use). That means a full licence of Artisteer costs between 1 to 3 times the cost of a one-off premium theme bought elsewhere.

So for an low cost and quick method of generated great looking templates, then do try Artisteer. Artisteer does have a free trial, where the final designs are watermarked. I strongly recommend you download it and have a play with it, even if you don’t end up buying it.

The links in this article to Artisteer are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission should anyone purchase Artisteer having clicked on one of the links in this article.

If you’re thinking of starting any kind of website, or you’re working with a client to create a new website, here are some questions to ask to help discover the goals of the new site. These questions are intentionally probing, teasing out how the website should look, and how the website should focus on the visitors.

You are free to use these questions anywhere you like. If you do re-use them, please let me know, as I’m interested to know what they get used for.

Website Goals

• What do you want to say on your website?
• What do you perceive is the value of having a website?

Target Audience

• Who is your target market?
• Is your business or website targeted at a specific geographic area? If so, what areas?
• What do you want your visitors to do once they get to your website?
• Should your visitors be able to purchase something directly from your website?
• Why should your visitors come back to your website?

Competitors

• Why should visitors visit your website rather than a competitors?
• Who are your competitors?
• What do your competitors do better than you?
• What do you do better than your competitors?

Design and Usability Ideas

• List up to 5 websites that you like and what you like about them.
• List up to 5 websites that you really dislike and what it is about them that you dislike.

Content

• What information do people always ask you for?
• Who will provide the content for the website?
• What information do you think people will visit your website for?

Domain Name

• Do you have a domain name?
• Do you need a domain name that represents your company name?

Promotion

• How will you promote the website?
• What do you know about social media?

Any more?

If you have any more ideas of questions to ask when creating a new website, please add them via the comments below!