Better Response from your Website

Earlier this year, I ditched my website homepage for a simpler design.

I "Google-fied" it, is what I told my friends.

Google's home page has a lot of white space. Compare it to Yahoo and you'll see one of the reasons Google won converts to their search engine.

Everyday on one of my other blogs, I feature a "Fort Wayne site of the day" at 6am.

There are some pretty bad websites in my town, along with many decent ones too.

Take a look at yours. Is it stuck in 2005, 2001, or (shudder) the 1990's?

Here's a few tips from MarketingProfs:

Improve Your Website by Removing These Four Things

Marketing experts often tell you which features your website absolutely must have. But for a post at the HubSpot blog, Kipp Bodnar created a list of items you should delete as soon as possible from your site. Here are a few items that deserve immediate elimination:

Complicated animation. There's little upside to Flash-based wizardry that hinders the visitor experience and impedes search engine optimization. "Perform a test," he advises. "Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site."

Industry jargon. Whatever your specialization, you start to assume everyone understands industry-specific language. This is a mistake. "Look through your website and highlight terms that are not commonly used outside of industry circles," Bodnar says. "Delete the highlighted words and replace them with more common explanations."

Images. Every website needs images—but you might have too many. Excessive images slow download speed when visitors click on a page, and search engines consider this a negative factor in page rankings. "Websites that have been around for a while can often collect lots of images, and some of them no longer go with the content of the site," he explains. "Keep some images, but go through and remove all images from your website that don’t help tell your company's story."

"Contact Us" forms. While you must provide contact information, Bodnar believes a generic contact form is more likely to attract spam than qualified leads. He suggests landing pages with dedicated forms for specific offers: "For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment."

The Po!nt: Sometimes less at your website is more—both for your customers' user experience and search engine optimization.

Source: HubSpot. Click here for the full post.

By the way, I kept my old website up too. I just moved it to a different domain. ScLoHo.net has been my domain since I started with my own site, but I also own ScLoHo.com.

Which do you like better?

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