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Health & Fitness

Is your web site half-baked?

The dinner bell might bring people to your table, but doesn’t mean they’ll find your meal appetizing.

Optimizing your site for the search engines may help bring visitors to your site, but it won’t keep them there. Only good content can do that.

On the internet, all the power is in the hands of the consumers in the form of that little mouse. If we don’t satisfy our visitors, it’s so simple for them to go elsewhere with a single click.

And your site visitors will judge very quickly, in a matter of seconds. User testing has shown that visitors first scan your page to see if it has the information they want. If it doesn’t, or if the answers are too hard to find, they will go elsewhere for a site that makes it easier to get answers. Visitors don’t want to struggle with your site if it isn’t isn’t intuitively understandable. And chances are, unless you don’t have any competitors in your business, they have a good chance of finding the same information more easily on another site.

Keep this in mind:
1. Users have many choices
2. Users judge your site in under six seconds
3. Users want navigation that doesn’t require thinking

Make it appetizing with design and content.

Clarity, both visually, and in terms of content, is crucial. If you can’t convey what you have to offer quickly, then be prepared to lose that visitor. All the keywords and search engine optimization in the world can’t solve that problem. Use keywords to get them to your site. Use content to keep them there. Thankfully, there are good designers who understand that web design is a balancing act. It’s one thing to get someone to your site, but if that the visitor finds your site visually unappealing, confusing to navigate, or uninformative, they will probably click away in an instant and you’ve lost your sale.

So, search engines bring visitors to your site. Good web design guides them easily to your content. Concise, informative writing pulls them in and keeps them there long enough to buy your product or at least consider it enough to bookmark and come back to your site.

Simplicity is the key ingredient. Simple, attractive design. Simple, concise text. Simple, clear keywords and key phrases. The nature of the web favors the simple over the complex. Web users have short attention spans. They scan content rather than reading it.

The first taste of your site must be scrumptious enough to make a big impression and keep people coming back. It isn’t just a professional logo and pleasing colors. Or how quickly your pages load. Or the clear layout and ease of navigation. Or the convincing, grammatically-correct writing. Or that you answer emails quickly. It is all of these things working together in a web design that complements and reinforces them.

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