The line between bad, good and great web design is closer than you think.
Website design is one of those things that is easy to learn, but hard to master. So many times I see websites for small businesses that are almost good but end up doing things in a way where the ten percent of the bad ends up ruining the ninety percent of the good. So often there is a website that is good, but could be great with just a few minor tweaks.
Recently I made a video where I reviewed the websites of a few local roofing companies. These websites varied in design from pretty good down to why is this like this? Of the four websites I reviewed, I would say one was really good, two were average and one was in need of a serious redesign. But what is telling is that even the really good website wasn’t great, but it could have been with just a few tweaks and a little more attention to detail.
In this article I’m going to go over the Five Barriers to Website Greatness I spotted when reviewing these websites and tell you why these don’t work and why there’s a better way. But first, if you want to go more in depth the video of me reviewing the local roofing websites is below for your viewing pleasure:
Barrier to Greatness #1: Poorly designed header navigation
The first piece of any website that the user sees is your header. The header of the website is the part with the logo and navigation and should be at the very top of your website, before any content.
The first mistake I saw consistently across the different websites was the lack of a clear call to action in the primary navigation for the website. The call to action should be a big button that gets users to do something. This can be a button like on this website where the user can click for a free consultation, or it can be a link to an estimate form or even a link to start a phone dialer to get the user to call your business.
Of the four websites, only two had calls to action in the primary navigation and of those two, only one had a call to action that was done in what I would consider the right way. We humans are creatures of habit and there’s a certain way that we process a website’s navigation: Logo, Navigation, Call to Action.
When it comes to your website navigation, it doesn’t pay to be unique. Users expect that your logo is on the left and that clicking it goes to your homepage. Then they expect your navigation to be to the right of your logo. Lastly, they expect there to be a clear call to action somewhere near the navigation, usually either on top or to the right of it. This allows people who know what they want to get it right away and bypass the rest of your website to get to the end result.
Lacking a clear call to action where users expect it in your navigation is leaving customers on the table. Without a clear call to action, your users might have to search for what you want them to do and the average user doesn’t have the attention span to hunt for what you’re offering.
Bottom line, don’t be unique with your navigation, and ensure you have a logo, some links and a clear call to action for the best results for your customers.
Barrier to Greatness #2: Not giving the hero the attention it deserves
The hero area is probably the most important part of your website. The hero area is the big area on most homepages that usually contains a photo, or sometimes a video or slideshow. The hero area is your website’s chance to grab your user’s attention. You only have a few seconds, so your hero has to grab your user’s attention, fast.
A good hero area can tell a user what your business does and why they should care in about five seconds. I see so many wasted opportunities where the hero area is under utilized. You want to have a quick, catchy and informative headline that lets a user know at a glance what your business does. Take the following two headlines, which one is better, option #1 or #2?
- We create innovative structural solutions to complex housing problems
- John’s Construction builds custom homes in Kane County and the surrounding area
If you read headline #1, you might not even know what this business offers. However, headline #2 offers a clear picture of the important information about this business. Who is it? John’s Construction. What do they do? Build custom homes. Where? Kane County.
So many businesses fail to have proper headline text and choose to write vague, flowery text like option #1. However, even worse than having bad text is having no text. Instead of having hero text front and center, so many websites opt for just an image or a slideshow and make the user scroll to see the first bit of text.
Making the user scroll to know what your website is a great way to get your users to lose interest in your website, fast. You want the pertinent information front and center for your users.
Back in the days of newspapers, there was this concept of above the fold, where the most important story in the paper was literally on the front half of the newspaper’s fold. Screens don’t have a fold, but they do have a scroll, so you want your most important text above the part of the page the user has to scroll to. You might only get to tell the user one thing about your business, so put the most important text about your business in your hero area above the point where users have to scroll the page.
Barrier to Greatness #3: Making the user work for their content
A great website is going to spoon-feed its visitors the content that you want them to see. Your users shouldn’t have to hunt to learn what you want them to learn. So often websites will hide information from their users unintentionally.
One way that websites can do this without knowing is by being unclear about who they are and what they offer. One of the websites I reviewed was for a roofing company that primarily specialized in commercial roofing services, but also offered residential roofing services. However, the first use of the word residential was hidden three quarters down their homepage and was visible only after the user scrolled past the word commercial at least two times.
If your customer is looking for residential roofing repair, do you think they are going to search a site that doesn’t seem made for them? No! The content of your website should be tailored for all of your customer types. Your homepage is not a destination, it’s a directory. Your homepage’s purpose is to funnel users of your website to content on your website that is more relevant to them, which is their final destination. If the journey isn’t clear for all of your customers, they are not getting on the train.
Another way that websites make finding the information users seek is by hiding it behind poorly designed interfaces. Things like a slideshow with no obvious controls or a button that is too small. If users get confused with a component or don’t know how it works, most of the time they’re not going to stick around to learn how it works. Instead, they’re moving on to your competitors and their website that does have what they are seeking.
Barrier to Greatness #4: Making the user re-learn how the web works
There’s so many websites that think they are being innovative by trying something new or fancy. Often this is in the form of a pretty design or animation. However, trying something new is very rarely something great and can actually become more of a hindrance than a helper.
For instance, one of the websites I reviewed decided to replace the mouse cursor icon with a custom house icon. While this might look cool, it flies in the face of everything that your users know about computers and the internet. Imagine you’re a user and suddenly your mouse cursor is gone! It might take you a second or two to realize that your mouse cursor has been replaced with this non-standard icon. Also, where does the user point? A mouse pointer is just that, a pointer, but with a custom icon it becomes less clear where the user will actually be clicking. Nothing is more frustrating that accidentally clicking the wrong thing.
Another area where many websites get tripped up are with fancy animations. While website owners think they look cool, they can actually break the way users expect the web to work. Users expect content to be available to them, so having an animation that interferes with the viewing of content or, even worse, hides previously displayed content can be more of a frustration than a benefit.
Animations that mess with the browser’s default scroll behavior can be especially egregious. Messing with the user’s scroll behavior is something you would be best to avoid. Users expect that scrolling the page will scroll the page, not lock the page in place as they scroll. Plus, taking over the default browser scroll behavior can cause all sorts of accessibility issues. While animations that interfere with the ability to scroll can look cool, they create too much of a difference from what users expect as standard behavior for me to ever recommend that a website use them except in perhaps the rarest of cases.
Barrier to Greatness #5: Not ending on a solid note
When a user views the end of your website, what do they see? If your website does things correctly, they should see a website footer that serves as a quick way to jump into more of your content. However, in the websites that I reviewed, only one took proper use of the footer for the piece of valuable real estate that it is.
As the last piece of your website that a user might see, your footer has a pretty important job. In a perfect world, your footer serves to shuttle your website visitors off to another page of your website. This is often done by having one or more set of interior links listed on your footer so a user who has reached the end of one page can quickly click off to another.
For some users, however, the footer is the end of the journey. They’ve viewed what your page has to offer and now they’re done. But even these users can benefit from a properly designed website footer. Your website footer should have the following information: Your business name and logo repeated for visibility, your contact information as well as links to interior pages of your website. Footers can also give your users even more options to engage with you such as by visiting your social media or filling out an email opt-in form. If your user is going to end their journey on your footer, the user should end their journey with a helpful guide that encourages them to explore more if they want to, rather than a blank brick wall staring them in the face.
Is your website truly great? Want it to be?
Maybe you’ve made it this far and can see in your website some of the barriers to greatness mentioned in this article. Or, maybe you just want to have the best website that you can have. Ask yourself: Is my website great? If not, why not?
If you’re ready for a truly great website, work with me and let me build the website that’s right for your business. My name is Brandon and I’ve been building websites for over fifteen years. Anyone can build you a good website, but it takes the right set of skills to build you a truly great website. If you’re ready to start building something truly great for your small business then schedule your free consultation with me, right now. Your Right Website awaits.