[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]our website may well be the first, or even only, interaction your customers have with your brand. Whether your business is solely online or your site is just a part of your brand’s reach, the impact it can have can be vitally important. This is why you definitely can’t afford to have your site doing anything harmful to your brand’s image. Here are three ways the way your site is designed and run may be hurting your brand without you knowing. If any of these things are an issue on your site, you need to take action straight away!
Unreliability
One of the worst things for someone who is trying to reach your content or site is to find the site or page down. While navigating around your site, broken links and other pages that don’t load or work properly will also make your site look unprofessional. Often, downtime can be caused by inadequate web hosting. This could mean that your host is not reliable, or that the package you opted for is not capable of supporting the traffic you are bringing in. It is therefore crucial to make sure you have hosting that properly supports you site and its users, and offers very good technical support.
Check out bestwebhosting.co.uk to find out more about hosting solutions. Another reason you may have downtime is because you are working on the site. You need to make sure you do this at low traffic times, and provide information to people trying to access the site explaining that maintenance is going on, and telling them when you expect to be back up.
Bad Content
Bad content is one of the worst things you can have on your site in terms of making people begin to get a bad impression about your brand. Content that is badly written, that has been produced clearly just to stuff in keywords, or which is irrelevant guest post content people have paid to place on your site, will all make you look bad. While not as serious a problem, it can also look bad if your content is in inconsistent styles. Use your content to reflect the tone you want for your brand, and at least keep styles consistent between authors, if not across the whole site.
Style Over Substance
Many businesses opt for a very fancy design for their site, which confronts the user with some slick looking graphics and effects, but very little content. This is a problem. A trendy homepage can be fine, but make sure not only that the information people may actually be looking for is there, but also that it is easy to find. A site that looks like a glossy advert will not serve you as well as one that visitors can really read and interact with.
These are just three things that happen on a lot of business websites, and which can have a less than positive effect on how visitors view brands.
