Making It Easier For Your Visitors To Hang Around
One of the most common mistakes we can make with blogs and other websites is to design them according to our own likes and dislikes.
While self expression is fine, if we are hoping to attract people, and keep them there long enough to read what we want them to, we need to build according to what they want.
If the colors on your theme are too gaudy, the text too small, or hard to read against the background, people will lose patience quickly and leave.
The other point to remember is the speed with which your blog, or website loads.
I had troubles with my broadband connection this week, and spent a few days on dial up speed.
It was a maddening experience to say the least.
One of the slowest sites to load was my own, which made me even madder.
Having said that though, it caused me to start working through my blogs, and websites, and start slimming them down,
I’m in the process of working out what’s slowing them down, and what I need to do to fix it.
To summarize, color clashes, and difficult to read text can turn people off.
This is especially true if their eyes are tired, or if they are vision impaired at all.
Slow loading sites are self defeating, especially if you are a marketer.
You can have all the greatest widgets and plugins, but if your site takes so long to load that visitors won’t wait, it’s all to no avail….
Clean clear and simple is always the best way. Good call
Thanks Jim! A lot of people add a lot of different colors and gizmos just because they can, but if it is about drawing people to a site, then those people need to be looked after. I try and use small paragraphs, with bold text here and there, to help readers' eyes move more easily down the page. Cheers!
My site was playing up too last week. It took forever to load and I had to remove some stuff I had hanging around "because I could" 😉 There are more things which I could streamline and I guess it's a matter of playing around with it to see how it performs. The trials of being a webmaster… challenges are fun!
G'day Ange! I saw a plugin earlier that is supposed to speed wordpress up, but I am going down the streamlining route first. What I like about this theme is that the post loads almost instantly, and the rest follows. It's an ongoing process though… Cheers Kokoda Girl!
Same here – I just deleted an ad that was causing a huge delay. Once I removed it, things went back to normal. I'm on broadband, so I'm not sure how long it takes to load on dial-up. My readers are pretty good about e-mailing me and letting me know if there's a problem, though, and I really appreciate that! 🙂
G'day Michele, My time on dial up speed was good for me in the sense that I learned how the other half lived. I revisited the issue today when I posted a video on Plurk, and someone in Africa couldn't watch it because they were on dial up. What if our readers or visitors don't tell us our sites are loading to slowly? If they are here for the first time they might just vote with their feet and leave… Cheers