I’ve been looking at other people’s websites for twenty-some years. The same handful of problems come up over and over.
None of them are exotic. All of them are fixable.
1. Trying to Say Everything at Once
The homepage that lists all eleven services, three awards, a slideshow and a newsletter signup above the fold.
Every one of those was somebody’s good idea. Together they cancel each other out. A visitor with eleven options picks none of them.
Pick the one thing you want people to do. Give it room. Let the page breathe.
2. Navigation Nobody Can Follow
Menus with clever names for ordinary pages. Dropdowns inside dropdowns. Important pages buried three levels down.
Call the services page Services. This is not where you get creative.
3. Slow Pages
People leave. That’s it, that’s the consequence.
Usually it’s enormous images nobody resized, or a pile of plugins each loading its own scripts. Both are fixable in an afternoon, and the difference is dramatic.
4. Text You Have to Squint At
Light grey on white. Type set too small. Lines running the full width of a monitor.
If your customers skew older, and for a lot of local businesses they do, this one costs you more than you’d guess. Make it bigger than feels necessary.
5. A Site That Looks Its Age
People read an old site as a business that might not still be around. Harsh, but it’s what happens.
A site that hasn’t been touched since 2016 says something you didn’t intend to say. Doesn’t have to be trendy. Just has to look like somebody still works there.
The Pattern
Every one of these is about the visitor, not the design. That’s usually where it goes wrong… the site gets built to please the owner instead of the customer.
Want me to look at yours? Reach out anytime. I’ll be honest about it.