What causes the confusion?

It can be a disconnect between what somebody thinks will be there and what is actually there. What I mean by that is that your socials can be light and passionate and fun and friendly on your socials. When somebody arrives on your website, it can be staid, dull, and it seems like it's nothing to do with you. I see this quite often.

I hold my hand up. I hate having my picture taken. I haven't liked it since I was about seven years old when I was a real show off. I know I'm saying I'm not a show-off even when I have this colour hair. I don't like my face being out there. If you are the face of your business, when somebody lands on your website, they immediately know they're in the right place if they see your smiling face there. It takes away any confusion.

As much as you may not like it, if you're like me, I encourage you to get some good photographs done. You can find photographers or do a course on it yourself. When somebody lands on your website and sees you there, they immediately know they're in the right place. It cuts out some of the confusion. We need to show our faces to connect. We need to do Facebook lives to connect and Insta reels and other stuff as well, depending on where your clients are on socials. The connection is essential. We want to cut down on any confusion.

An example of when I was confused; I was asked to check out a person's website. Her name was different on the website, so I didn't recognise it. The branding was utterly different. The only thing that connected that I knew I was in the right place was her smiling face. Everything else was different, so I was very confused. She told me that I'd found an old website that she no longer used. There's another tip. If you've got more than one website on the go, make sure that they're updated to be relevant to be who you are at the moment or that you direct one website to the other one.

If your socials are fun, exciting and passionate, your website needs to be this. When a visitor lands on your website, even with your smiling face there, it creates that disconnect if the feel is not the same as your socials. It causes that confusion. I'm not suggesting that we are stupid. I am saying that we have got many things going on in our brains. Even as you're reading this, you're still thinking about a million other items in your business. We're rarely absolutely focused on what's in front of us. That's the same when we look at a website. We rarely read everything that's on the screen. We need to keep things as simple as possible to get information across to people visiting our website.

Branding

You want your branding to be consistent, including colours, fonts, tone and images. Branding is a lot more than just a logo. Although a recognisable logo can help, branding is more than that.

When deciding on your fonts, make sure people can read your fonts. It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised at the number of websites I check where I can't read the title font. Many curly fonts can be challenging to read, especially depending on colours. Mentioning colours, I've recently had two clients come to me who have used orange and greens in their logo. They also decided to use it for the title text. Green and Orange, especially if you have any difficulties with colour blindness, can be difficult to read. Even when I knew what a word said, I could not read it easily.
Even if your colours are bizarre, you want the text to be able to be read easily in a font that's easy to read. You can get curly fonts that are still easy to read and colours that are easy to read.

Where do you want people to start?

No matter how beautiful your website is, people will want to know how to work with you. They will also want to know how to start working with you and how your services are offered. If they don't know basic information, you'll lose a client.

For me, I always suggest a chocolate and a chat session. It's a free 30 minutes session, an excellent way for people to get to know me, to see if we're a good fit for each other.

You want to know that somebody's got the same values. You're going to be able to work with them well if you're working with somebody in a relationship. I see myself as your partner, so I'm on your side. On your website, you can even have a start here page. You want to put it in your client's language so that they know this is the best way to get to work with you.

You may offer free sessions or an e-book, or a webinar. Whatever it is, make it clear to them that that's where they can start to build a relationship with you.

Promoting your current service

Another thing I find is that people come to me and say people aren't buying the service they've been promoting. They've been promoting this for months, and nobody's buying it. A possible reason is that you may have a direct link to a landing page, a separate page on your website, or even in a newsletter like Mailerlite or Mailchimp. If you're promoting a service, have it on the homepage of your website. If people find your home page from a search engine, if you don't have the service that you're promoting clear somewhere, they may not find it. Remember, we want to keep things simple. If I'm going to have to dig around to find something, unless I want that service, I will go elsewhere.

How to contact you?

You want people to be able to find out how to contact you. Most of us have a contact form on a contact page, but you can also have a phone number and email at your website's top and bottom. Don't just have it on a contact form, and don't have the contact form hidden in different layers of the menu either. Make it simple for people to be able to contact you. You want people to contact you quickly.

Websites are not set, and forget

If you're promoting a service with a landing page, you can connect that landing page to your website. You can have the service on the front page. Your front page can change as your business changes.

Check your SSL certificate for security

You need to ensure that you've got an SSL certificate on their website. If the SSL certificate has expired, website visitors will receive browser warnings. This experience can be as scary. Every website now needs an SSL certificate to encrypt the information going to and from the website. If a hacker interrupts any data, it will all be encrypted, so they won't be able to use it. It won't make any sense to them whatsoever. Your hosting company may give you a free SSL certificate, or you can buy them. The certificate changes the HTTP to HTTPS.

It used to be that it was only e-commerce websites that needed them. Every website needs an SSL certificate, and browsers will stop you from visiting unsecured websites. If you pay for a certificate, you must ensure it does not expire.

How to navigate your website?

Check the navigation of your website. It's becoming more common on some websites to have the three bars like the hamburger menu, even on the desktop. Now, if your clients are used to that, that's fine. But if they're not, they may look at these three bars and wonder what it is. At least have the three bars with the name menu underneath.

We're trying to make things simple. When things are too hard, we leave.

Use icons that everyone knows

When using icons, make sure that they're standard icons that everybody will understand or have a word describing them beneath them. Now, this isn't talking about accessibility, though it's moving towards that. But it's also just thinking about how we make things simple. We don't read everything we see, so we need to have things clear and simple.