Why your website is turning away visitors

Originally published on Naughty and Spice.

Thank you so much for having me, it’s so exciting to get to hang out here with the Naughty and Spice ladies. Today, I want to talk about websites. In my many jobs, I spend a lot of time looking at websites—from looking at how the code behaves, to the aesthetics of the design, to how the site functions as a marketing tool. So, in the course of my web travels, I see a lot of things that could be sabotaging your site before your visitors even get a chance to see how awesome your books are.

The Code

Over the past few years, there’s been a definite shift away from table-based layouts. There are a couple of reasons for this—the evolution of the code standards, decreasing file sizes, and search engine friendliness.

What does this mean for your site? Well, a smaller file size means a faster load time. You have about a ten-second window for your site to load before a visitor gets bored and goes to another site. So the faster you can get your site in front of them, the more likely they are to stick around.

As well, if you have less code, it’s easier for the search engines to dig around in your site to find your keywords to get you listed in more search results. And, the big search engines like Google and Yahoo! are more likely to bump a valid, standards-compliant website in their results over ones that aren’t. Since most people rarely go past page four or five of the search results, it’s always a good idea to get your site higher on the list if you want to be found.

The Look

Yes, when it comes to websites, design matters. From colour palette choices to the layout of the elements of the site, all of this plays a part in how long people will stay on your site.

I love home décor sites as inspiration for my colour palettes. But if that doesn’t work for you, there are tons of great colour palette generators that launch from your favourite colour or your favourite picture, and will give you a scheme of colours that blend well together, using the same tones and complimentary shades.

Also, looking at the design, blinkies, animated graphics and other flashy features may seem fun in theory, but when visitors are trying to read your content, they’re just darn distracting.

I get you may be trying to set an ambiance with a musical soundtrack to your site, but consider your users… are they visiting from work, where your autoplay of Brit’s latest – If You Seek Amy – just outed them as surfing to inappropriate sites? What about catching a few minutes while the baby is sleeping? Or while they’re watching TV? Personally, if I hit a site that starts yelling at me, I close the window immediately, whether I needed to be on that site or not.

And, your font… you want to make it easy for people to read. I love a white text on black background, but there are a lot of people who find that really difficult to read. So too are fancy, swirly fonts that you can’t figure out what they say.

I’m not sure why, but font size on websites has been getting increasingly smaller. Sure, I can bump up the font size on my browser, but if the site isn’t designed right, doing this often breaks the design.

The Content

So, now that you’ve helped visitors find you and they’re not turned off by your design, you need to keep them on your site. Let’s face it, pretty is only going to get you so far. After people have seen the look, they need a reason to keep coming back, and that’s your content.

This starts with good navigation that makes logical sense. Anything more than seven possible options in your top-level navigation is usually too much choice for your readers. And if they don’t know that “The Boudoir” is your bio and “The Den” is your booklist, are they going to click in there to find out?

And, let’s take that further… don’t splat everything on the home page. If there’s too much going on, the eye doesn’t know where to look, and they’ll either get overwhelmed and leave, or will miss something important. Visitors also aren’t likely to scroll for miles and miles just to read everything.

You’ll also want to keep your site updated. Yesterday, I went to a web designer’s site that hadn’t been updated since 2005. That doesn’t say to me that he’s done anything new since then and nothing leads me to believe he’s even still offering web design services.

If you’re not a frequent enough blogger or updater (and I admit to being guilty of this one *grin*), consider offering a lifestream, which shows the feeds from your social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Good Reads and so on. Then people are still seeing new content when they visit, even if it’s only 140 characters at a time.

Finally, the most frequent request I’ve seen for an author’s site is a printable booklist of all of your books, including the series names and the order of the books in the series. I’d also love to see the name of the publisher, and where I can get the book, if you’re published with a small press that only sells off its own site.

Besides, if readers don’t know you have a new book coming out, how will they know to go buy it?

So… let me ask you. What drives you crazy when you visit a website? What do you absolutely want to see when you get there?

Laurie M. Rauch is an editor, writer and web designer who has spent countless hours online. She believes that great user experiences start at the first line of code. She is the founder of Elle Media (http://www.getelle.com), a design studio specializing in creating standards-compliant, accessible websites that not only follow the rules, but inspire web traffic too.