3 Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

In our new Boxcar Marketing website it was important for James and me to implement as many best practices as possible. We wanted to start with a solid design based on usability. Here are 3 mistakes we often point out to clients and how we avoided them in our design.

Design Mistake #1: The About Us page is an About Me page.
Why is About Me a mistake for a business About page? Although we are pretty pleased with ourselves, the primary purpose of our About page is to establish what we can do for YOU. Too often About pages are nice corporate histories but are not valuable in terms of closing a sale, building trust and establishing credentials that are relevant to potential clients.
Look at our About page for ideas on how you can move beyond About Me and towards About You.

Design Mistake #2: No Author Photo or Company Photo
For companies like ours, where the primary contact is James Sherrett or Monique Trottier, the photo is important. In general, photos of staff or key employees are important for two reasons: photos offer a more personable impression of the company and photos connect the virtual and physical world. For example, people who meet me at a QuickLearn session or see me on a Lab with Leo episode will immediately recognize that they have come to the right website. And in reverse, people who read the Boxcar Marketing blog are more likely to recognize me when we meet in person at a conference or for a meeting.

Design Mistake #3: More-on Links
I posted in September a marketing tip on link text: “Don’t Be a More-On”. In short, more-on refers to hyperlinks that say things like, “Read more” or “Click here.” James and I think these types of links are pretty useless and we aim to write hyperlink text that is persuasive or at minimum tells the visitor where they are going. We are not 100 percent perfect in our link text, but you can see 2 examples in this post. The link directing you to our About page is an example of a persuasive link. It identifies the benefit: Look at our site and borrow ideas for improving your own. If our site was sales focussed, I would enhance that text further by saying something like, See how Boxcar Marketing doubled sales by improving their About copy. Much more persuasive than “Click Here”, right?

The above hyperlink text, a marketing tip on link text: “Don’t Be a More-On”, is the second example. The text gives you an indication of where you will go if you click on that link. On the web, life is too short to click on uncertain links.

What do you think? Do you use your About page differently? Do you have photos? What text do you use for the majority of your links? Share your thoughts.