ITB BLOG

Flash and other signs your website needs an update

When a potential customer comes to your website, you have about 15 seconds of their time to persuade them to stay and look around at the products and services you offer.

In that moment, the customer will decide if he or she wants to deal with you, if they have confidence that you are on your game, and if you will be a good fit for the type of product or service they want.

If you think appearances count when you meet a person, amplify that and fast forward it when considering how much appearances count when you meet a website. A recent study at Stanford University revealed that 75 per cent of people judge whether or not your company is credible simply by looking at your website.

If your website design is more than three years old, chances are it is in danger of deterring customers from contacting you.

The number one issue in 2015 is to check first that your website is capable of being seen on a mobile device like an iPhone. Numbers vary from study to study, but an average of 45 per cent of local searches are performed using mobile devices. If searchers can’t open your website quickly, they won’t stick around and allow you to make an impression at all.

A quarter of all Internet users now only access it using a mobile device and there is every indication that the trend will just keeping growing.

Once you get mobile-friendly, the next big challenge is to enhance the user experience on your website. Two trends that were popular five years ago but don’t work now are designs in Flash and designs that open with background music.

Your Flash design cannot be seen on iPhones and iPads and it throws your search engine optimization scheme out the window because Google, Bing and Yahoo can’t read it. That doesn’t mean you have to give up all animation and fun stuff on your site; it just means you need to find a designer who can create it with HTML5.

If your search engine rankings are low, you likely also need to focus more attention on creating high quality and regularly changing content to keep scoring high. Gimmicks and tricks just won’t do the job anymore, especially since the implementation of Google’s Hummingbird program in 2013.

Ensuring you are current with SEO trends is vitally important since more than 90 percent of people will arrive at your website by way of search engine, according to Search Engine Journal.

Other corporate website trends are clean and open designs. No matter how much information you have to share with your visitor, you must find a way to keep clutter to a minimum on your site.

 

 

 

Roz Bahrami
Roz Bahramihttps://skyprep.com/
Roz Bahrami is a blogger for SkyPrep, an online training software for companies to train employees and measure results. Roz is a regular contributor to blogs related to corporate training, L&D, and HR technology. Visit my personal blog at TrainingConnoisseur.com

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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