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Your website is your most vital online tool. When visitors click on your homepage, it’s often their first opportunity to interact with your brand. If you’re not getting results, you’ve probably made some major—and pretty common—mistakes on your site. Fortunately, it’s often easy to correct such problems. By employing a few simple measures, you can turn a website misfire into a recipe for higher conversions and enhanced brand awareness. Here are 4 common mistakes you are making on your website–and how to fix them.

1. Information Overload

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Deluging visitors with data, especially on your homepage, doesn’t help pitch your products or your brand. People get overwhelmed by too much detail, and the more of it you cram into one space, the more your call to action gets buried under minutia the consumer doesn’t need to know.

How to Fix It: Less is more. Provide simple bulletpoints of information that get the point across and make an impact. Lead quickly into a clear call to action. Make it easy for your visitors to see what you’re about, what you’re offering and why they need to act now.

2. Your Design Doesn’t Reflect Your Brand

You had the best of intentions when you asked your cousin to splash slick, globule-like designs all over your homepage. It’s artsy and cool—and that draws a crowd, right? Sure it does, if you’ve got an art display on the sidewalk. People will stop and glance at it, but they won’t know what it means and they won’t really care.

How to Fix It: Hire a professional service to design a site that’s simple, concise and makes every element cohesive and reflective of your brand. Design is the most powerful element on your site. To make an effective first impression you need to make an impact. Work with a design professional to paint a picture of your company that ties into your brand and resonates with your audience.

3. Your Content is Stale

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Search engines love fresh content. Why? Because users flock to it. If you’re not updating your content, people have nothing new to look at. Stale content can drop your site to the bottom of the SERPS, and your visitors will stop caring, because they’ll assume you stopped caring, too.

How to Fix It: Updating site content is a simple and inexpensive fix. Host a blog or post fresh articles daily or at least twice a week. SEO is important and should be incorporated, but don’t stuff content with keywords until it’s unreadable. Keep your content interesting, relevant and tied to your brand—and keep adding more. People will read it, grow familiar with your company and care more about your brand and your offerings.

4. You Missed Your Target Market

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The Internet is the only venue that grants you immediate exposure to virtually the entire world. So it may be tempting to try to reach everyone with an unfocused site that targets…no one. By being too broad, you’ll miss the mark, miss your target market and miss out on conversions and business growth.

How to Fix It: You need to cater to your audience. If you’re an apparel store that sells clothes targeted at women in their late 20’s to early 40’s, that’s the market you need to appeal to by using all the elements of your site, including design and content.

Making mistakes on your website can hamper business growth and drive away visitors. Fortunately, the most common errors are easy to fix. Build a site that delivers on brand awareness, clean, focused design and relevant content, and watch your business and consumer base grow.

What makes an infographic successful? As designers, we want it to achieve a balance of two main things:

• Did the reader get the message we wanted them to get?
• Was the message memorable?

Doctoral student Michelle Borkin of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences worked with collaborators to collect, analyze and present 2,070 single-panel visualizations from a range of publications and websites.

In the “largest scale visualization study to date,” they asked, “What Makes a Visualization Memorable?”

 

Caveat

Memorability is very important, but still just half the recipe.

The researches did not look at how well viewers understood the images, just how well they remembered them. Borkin’s next steps are to measure comprehension: that new study is already in progress.

This study represents the first step in their research, as they explore what makes an effective infographic, but it already raises questions about what designers have believed so far.

 

What they did

First, the team created a “visual taxonomy” of the images, identifying them by qualities like chart types, number of colors and presence of human-recognizable objects. They also classified attributes like the presence of non-essential decoration and “visual density” (a.k.a. clutter).

“Redesign Your Place” infographic designed for DMC Bologna, by Jacopo Ferretti

Then they chose 410 images that evenly represented the range of their sources (like news, science and the infographics site, visual.ly) as well as the range of qualities they’d identified. Using that group, they ran an online experiment (using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) in which participants watched a stream of images and clicked a button whenever they saw one they believed had been shown before.

 

What they learned

To the surprise of the researchers, bar graphs and charts did poorly. It turns out (news flash) they all kinda look the same. The most memorable images contained “human recognizable objects.” Think mundane stuff like photos or illustrations of bottles, animals and shoes, not to mention people.

“Who is Occupy Wall Street” infographic created for Fast Company, by Jess3

Other important points:

1. Color made a huge difference: the more, the better.
2. Images with more clutter were highly memorable. How much more memorable? A lot.
3. Images with lots of circles and rounded corner graphics also ranked high.

 

More about clutter

Plenty of psychology lab studies show that simple and clear visualizations are easier to understand. However, researchers have also found that “chart junk” (a term coined by Edward Tufte, so important it gets its own Wikipedia entry) can improve retention because it forces us to work harder at understanding a graph, resulting in better comprehension.

Again, understanding what makes an infographic memorable is only the first step to creating more effective presentations. According to Borkin, “Making a visualization more memorable means making some part of the visualization ‘stick’ in the viewer’s mind.” She emphasizes that we also need to learn how to make sure that what sticks is our intended message, and not the eye candy.

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