Website Clutter? Time for Spring Cleaning!
by Dave Maloney
We've all got our piles of stuff that we just can't get rid of (for most of us, the best solution is to avoid it and deal with it later), but a cluttered website may be doing more harm than you realize. The longer you put off doing a little freshening-up on your web pages, the more potential customers you may be missing out on!
Cleaning Up Website Clutter = Simplifying
You keep hearing about what your website needs to have, but now try thinking about what it doesn't need. Skim over your pages, or have someone with a fresh set of eyes give you their first impressions. If your pages overcomplicated with too many messages or images competing to be read first, you may be scaring away visitors who would be potential customers. These visitors came to your site looking for something specific; make sure that something specific is easy for them to find without having to wade through stacks of website clutter. Think about which message(s) are the most important and which other ones might not need to be there. Maybe they need to have their own page?
Images are essential to adding life to a page, but too many images, or irrelevant clipart doesn't really help anything. Are your images optimized for the web? The more pictures you have on a page, the longer it will take to load, on any device, and people don't like to wait. Do they all really need to be there? Do you have any Flash animations? They also take time to load (or don't load at all on a lot of devices), hinder your page's search engine optimization, and don't offer much beyond a distraction. Consider testing its effectiveness by removing it for a set period of time and comparing your page's results.
Do you have to scroll down to read your whole page? No matter how important you think all that text is, too much to read just gets ignored as website clutter. Remember, less really is more! Could that text be updated, maybe broken up into separate topics on new pages, or can you just simply your message?
Whether it's a cluttered website, garage or kitchen counter, by spending a little time going through what's in your piles, you may actually find a few things you could live without. And don't worry that you "might need it as soon as you throw it away" - if it's not helping your website build more business, you don't need it!