How to Clear the clutter! by Greaves Design
17th April 2014
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Many websites suffer from what is commonly called TMI - too much information. It's understandable why this happens. After all, a website can take the place of what used to happen in person, or at least over the telephone. In person-to-person interaction, the first person can tell the other what they're looking for, so it's easier for the second person to help them. But on the internet, you don't know why someone has come to your website, so it's easy to get bogged down in trying to address every concern, every possible query and all areas of interest. This can lead to web pages that are stuffed full of images, overly long text, buttons, banners and more. This can overwhelm your website visitors and leave them unable to work out what to do. If this happens, they may just go elsewhere to find the information or buy the product they're looking for.

There are some simple things you can do to avoid falling into this trap. Firstly, be sure to think carefully about the structure and navigation of your website. If itâs clear how a visitor can move around your website, they'll easily be able to work out where they want to go and find what they're looking for. This means you can have less information and clutter on a page, because you don't need to show the visitor everything at once. One way to do this is to group related items together. For example, if you install lighting, you might want to categorise your website into pages about bathroom lighting, kitchen lighting, industrial lighting, shop lighting and so on, rather than having just one page that covers all the lighting supplies you stock.

You should also try to ensure your pages are visually clean and simple. Don't use lots of different fonts or lots of images unless there's a real need to do so. Otherwise, it will simply confuse your visitor as they won't be able to focus on the key thing you want them to focus on. If you do want to emphasise something, use a bold version of your main font or have a box that highlights the information. Use these kinds of features sparingly to ensure that the reader's eye is drawn to them.

Keeping information simple can be counter-intuitive, but you need to remember how much information people are bombarded with every hour of every day. By clearing the clutter and organising your website sensibly, visitors are far more likely to stay on your website and become customers. This will also support your search engine optimisation (SEO) work, as the longer they stay and the more they share links to your website with other people, the better your website will fare in Google's rankings.

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Trevor I

Member since: 17th April 2013

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