The easiest mistake any website owner can make is obfuscating his website’s message with a cornucopia of CTAs (Call to Action), animations, star flashes, notices and others.
But how tempting it is to display every special offer, campaign, news or any other key item on your home page! Of course all these items and notices are important and we need to put them all on one page where the user will find them. How else will he find them? And we need to put them all there because ALL of them are important! Right?
Well not quite actually.
As cliche and old hat as the old phrase is: when it comes to advertising layout (and you’d better believe that your web page is a piece of advertising just like a magazine is), less is very more; most definitely.
Competition
Website owners may not realize it but as soon as they start crowding a web page with multiple ‘eye-catching’ elements they are creating a competition between those elements, and the more elements he places the more it looks like ‘noise’ to the user, and thus he ignores them and you in turn loose out.
With that said the website owner must be very selective and conservative about how many and what type of notices he puts on his page, choosing only the most critical ones, because as soon as you add in others it will take the attention off your critical messages, creating the opposite effect that you originally intended.
What do I do now?
Website owners need to determine what they actually want the user to do when they go to their website. Whether that is go to the ‘free estimate’ where they will then fill out the form, or to the ‘products’ page where they can purchase products, or to the ‘free newsletter’ page where they sign up.
Once this is determined the next step is to prominently and clearly steer the user in that direction with notices/calls to actions etc, and not add any more noise by trying to steer the user in another direction than your primary one.
By doing this you will regain a tremendous control over your web users and enable your website to do what it is actually meant to.
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