What You Don't Know About Your Website...
Let's illustrate this point by an example. You go online to shop around for something you really need. Then you find it in two places. Both offer you good discounts, etc. However, one site is slow, full of misspellings, and you come across broken links from time to time. A simple question - where will you buy?
The answer is quite natural and our research confirms that up to 27% visitors leave any site because of a broken link or slow pages. Can you afford to lose one third of your customers? Another 27% leave as quickly as they came after landing on a poorly designed site. Whether it be a combination of colors that throw you into an epileptic fit, navigation that can't be found or deciphered, or a site that looks like it was designed in a kindergarten class.
Your users are evaluating your site every day, and it takes them only a few seconds to decide. They are critically examining your site in the blink of an eye and determining authority, authenticity, and applicability to their purpose, their needs. This is the age of digital and information literacy. The internet community is no longer easily fooled.
Broken links, incorrectly rendered images, confusing navigation, multiple size fonts, and other proven and common mistakes, can seriously damage that element called the "credibility" of your website. Credibility is especially important in the World Wide Web, because here you don't see your seller in person and the risk of fraud is several times higher. You would certainly choose to purchase from a website that looks professional and works like a Swiss watch: its owner probably invested a lot of time and money to achieve this effect, UNLIKE a fraudster that makes a website for one week and doesn't care about what would happen to it when it finally compromises itself and loses any reputation. Contractor Online Marketing Experts are here to to help you keep looking professional and instill that trust.
Evaluating your website should be an ongoing task, and part of the maintenance of your website. It’s the process of collecting, analyzing, and evaluating data that tells you how well your website is meeting its objectives, so you can make improvements. Routinely evaluating your site helps create a higher quality product that meets your customers’ needs and your business mission. It’s not a one-time exercise; it’s an ongoing process that requires an overall strategy to determine what, when, and how you’ll evaluate your website.
There are two kinds of performance measures related to websites, and they are sometimes confused:
Why Is Website Evaluation Important?
A website take time, absorb resources, and cost money. It’s your job, as the business owner, to make sure your website is written and designed well, that visitors can use it easily, that it’s accurate, and that it’s contributing to the achievement of your overall mission. You need to evaluate and test your website routinely to make it more efficient, appropriate, and useful to your visitors.
The best way to improve the effectiveness of a Web site is to have data that indicates how it’s performing. Many measures can be used to improve your website. Web managers no longer need to rely on conjecture, opinions, hunches, personal preferences, or other subjective information. Decisions can be based on data and research.
Following basic usability principles and techniques is a must. Usability, as it relates to the web, is the measure of the quality of a user's experience when they interact with your website.
Research shows that people cannot find the information they seek on Web sites about 60% of the time. This equates to wasted time, reduced productivity, increased frustration, and loss of repeat visits and money. Don't allow that experience to be used to described your website.