Every day more and more visitors are drawn to your website. They are navigating through your pages, possibly viewing the products that are for sale online; they’re looking for contact information, and all sorts of other things. Does your site have all sorts of common mistakes throughout causing frustration to viewers or turning them away from your website or possibly even your company? Here are a few common mistakes too look for in your website.



Hidden contact information: Are brand new visitors to your website faced with a maze to find out how to contact you? An ideal setup will either have a phone number or email at the bottom of every page. If this isn’t doable, then a link to a contact page should be visible from everywhere the visitor may go.



Broken Links: Nothing can be more irritating than trying to travel somewhere that doesn’t exist. A successful website is organized and deletes links that are no longer needed or no longer active. This will keep the visitor where they need to be and much less frustrated.



Dead Ends: Have you ever been sent a link to a page that has no means of returning to the home page or the parent page of that particular section of the site? It is a good rule of thumb to always always always have a clearly visible link to the home page and ideally, a link to the last page the visitor was at. People are constantly surfing through sites and often finding they just need to go back to where they started.



New Windows or Tabs: Today’s browsers are all about tabs but that doesn’t mean that you have to employ them. When all of your links open a new window or a new tab, the visitor can easily get lost or confused and just close all of them or accidentally close the important ones. This is also another important reason to link to the home page because ideally, everyone wants to be able to click somewhere without losing all of their previous searching progress but nobody wants to end up with seven windows open from one company’s website.



Excessive font and color: Changing fonts or changing colors throughout your website may be fun and visually appealing as an art project, this doesn’t get things done. An efficient website uses no more than two or three fonts that aren’t hard to read and has an organized color scheme that is mostly out of the way of the important content.



Your Content: There is much to say about content but to make it concise, you want the user to be able to hear what you need to say in a clear and efficient manner. Keep your text short and to the point but make sure that it is still informative. Avoid using technical jargon that the layperson may not know. You may impress them but they won’t know anything new about your company.



All of these principles lend to a more user friendly website. Getting these down may be a daunting task for most people trying to run a business and maintain a website. If your website does not exhibit these characteristics, Codank is here to help.

source: http://www.articleorange.com/articles/4197/1/Does-Your-Site-Have-These/Page1.html