Do You Make It Difficult for Your Website Visitors to Discover Who You Are and What You Do?

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Website owners often are too close to the material on their own websites to notice that their website home pages frequently are NOT clear to site visitors.

Here’s an example of this problem:

On a call with a client and her PR person we looked at book author websites to see what other people were doing.

One site made what I consider the biggest error of all:  The book author’s name was nowhere – and I mean nowhere – on the home page.  In fact, it was very unclear what the home page was about.

Plus there were tons of nav buttons including one near the bottom of the nav column that announced: “Yes! It’s a book as well.”  (I kid you not.)

And guess what?  We couldn’t find the author’s name on this page announcing the book will be out this June. (If his name was on the book cover photo, it was so small we couldn’t read it.)

Finally on the “Speaking Events” page we found the author’s name mentioned.

A few hours after this phone consultation I noticed on Twitter a link to a post about branding.  I clicked to check it out.  And shook my head in disgust.  The post was written in all caps – (that’s right, all caps) – in white type on a light blue background.  Basically the post was illegible.

Right before this I had checked on someone else’s Twitter profile.  He had just started following me and I wanted to see if I were interested in following him back.  His bio of some indeterminate color ink was written on a black background.  I couldn’t read a word.  Do you think I followed him back?

And clicking through on a link to a blog post that someone said had to be read about the book publishing industry – the type was so small and the paragraphs so dense that I took one look and said to myself: “I’ll have to pass up this info – valuable though it may be – as I’m not going to hurt my eyes squinting to read it.”

A few weeks ago I read a blog post by a book author who bragged she knew her book site was good because many other mystery writers’ sites also had white type on black backgrounds such as hers.  She was clueless that, just because many mystery writers make their sites extremely difficult for people to read, does not mean this is a good idea.

If you get one point from this article – please get this one: If you make it difficult to read (in any number of ways) what you’ve written in cyberspace, you’ve guaranteed that less people will read your words.

Forget playing with the black backgrounds, small type, dense paragraphs, all caps, etc.  Publish your words in a type and format that can be read clearly by most people. – P.Z.M.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a National Internet Business Examiner at http://www.InternetBizBlogger.com as well as a book author, and her power marketing company http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com combines traditional marketing principles and Internet marketing strategies to put power in your hands.

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