When was the last time you spruced up your online shop front?

If you are anything like us, you had visitors come to stay over the summer  (Devon is so beautiful that it’s great to share!) And if you are anything like us, that impending visit set off a flurry of tidying and cleaning to ensure that your place looked in a fit state for you to receive guests.

Well, have you thought about how often you have a spring (or summer) clean of your website? Your website is there all the time – it’s your online shopfront. And yet, it’s probably languishing in the ‘untouched for months’ pile of your to-do list.

The thing is, you can’t choose when visitors come to your website – it’s there all the time, waiting to receive them. And if they don’t get the right experience, then away they will go, never to come back. You might even have given them a negative view of your business as a whole.

It’s not just you – I know my site is far from perfect, but I am working on that.

Thing is, if you’re sending traffic and visitors over by using social media, email, Google ads, Facebook ads or any other means – it’s not going to get you the results you hoped for unless your visitors get a great experience of your business at the end of it.

Good practice is to have a landing page prepared to receive visitors from traffic referrers such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and PPC or email campaigns. This will increase the effectiveness of any of these forms of marketing hugely. But your new visitors will still want to see the rest of the website they have found themselves on.

So – here goes – 5 questions to ask of your website to make sure it’s not letting you down:

• Do you know what your want you website to do for you – and is it built with this in mind? Is it congruent with your offline marketing?
• Is your website so easy to navigate that a 10 year old child could find their way to every product and service you offer?
• Is the copy written in terms of benefits to your new potential customer and why they should be talking to you and only you about your product or service? (TIP. Count the number of times your copy says ‘I’ or ‘we’ rather than ‘you’ or ‘yours’)
• Is it interesting enough to grab and keep your visitors’ attention, and relevant to what they want to find out?
• Do you have video (on your home page at least…) and photos running all the way through your site for added retention time and impact?

Oh … and lastly – a huge bugbear of mine is having to hunt to find out how to contact the business who’s website I’m browsing. Why make it difficult for customers to contact you? Put a big, loud phone number at the top of every page!!

I hope this is a helpful reminder of website faux pas to avoid and key areas to fix. What would you add to the list? Please comment below!