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Don't Say Too Much

Tuesday, 11 June 2013 00:00

One of my college professors offered this advice about writing a news story: “Like a mini skirt, it should be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to still be interesting.” This also is true when you are designing your website.

There is a balance between too much information and not enough.

 

First your website must grab the visitors’ attention. You have to do this within the first five seconds of when they land on your page. Their closest exit is only a click away.

The second thing you have to do is to pique their interest. Give readers information without bogging them down in the details. The temptation on a website is to include lots and lots of information. Don’t do it. You must resist that urge. Either you will bore your readers or — and this is probably worse — you will give them so much information that they don’t need to contact you. It’s pretty hard to make the sale that way. You can actually defeat yourself by putting up too much info.

Of course, you can have just the opposite problem, too,

I think we’ve all seen examples of the “bare bones” website. This is the site that has too little info. Your clients need more than an address and phone number. They need a reason to spend money with you. They need a reason to choose you over your competitors. Your website should be professional and inviting. You want to be approachable.

Related Article: Get The Media To Work For You

And even if you’re happy with your current website, you have to add new content to it all the time. This helps you in two ways. The obvious advantage is that customers and potential customers get an interesting page and a reason to return to it. The other advantage has to do with spiders. Yes, the worldwide web has spiders. They wander around the internet and look for new information. If you want your site to stay near the top of the search engine returns — and you do — you have to feed your website regularly.

There are lots of ways to improve your website. Some are drastic more and some are easy fixes. We can help you get it going in the right direction.

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