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Posts Tagged ‘case study’

5 Reasons Why Having Image Sliders on Your Home Page Is a Bad Idea

More and more business websites are having home pages dominated by image sliders, also known as ‘carousels’. These have become increasingly common due to out of the box content management systems such as WordPress, with many themes including image slider plugins.

However, recent usability studies have indicated that using image sliders on your home page are a bad idea and many leading companies are now moving away from this design.

Below are some strong reasons why image sliders are a bad idea:

  1. Image sliders can be mistaken for banners or banner advertising, which people have learnt to ignore. One study found that it’s more likely that you will survive a plane crash or win the lottery than click a banner ad.
  2. The area where banners normally appear is the prime real estate of your site (the part of the home page that appears before scrolling). This is where your company should be presenting its USP’s and / or call–to-actions such as sign-ups.
  3. The moving or sliding motion distracts visitors from other areas of the site.
  4. Multiple large, high definition images can have a negative impact on page load speed, particularly is using entry-level, shared web hosting or the user is using a slower or heavily contended connection. A small increase in load time can negatively impact the visitor experience and adversely affect search engine performance.
  5. Studies have shown that image sliders aren’t very effective, attracting at little as 1% of clicks.

What You Should Consider Instead

Usability studies have shown that website visitors make a sub-conscious decision whether they will stay on site and engage within 200ms of landing on one of your pages. Your website’s prime real estate should be the area where your business presents it’s USP’s, why visitors should engage with you (and not your competitors) and / or it’s call-to-actions, such email sign-ups.

References:

improvement of wordpress site on shared hosting

Case Study – Website Improvement

Improving a Slow Web Site in Order to Reduce Bounces

At Crescent Digital, in our strive for constant improvement, we sometimes stay awake at night worrying about how fast our clients websites are loading and is there anything else we can do to squeeze more performance out of them in order to generate more conversions.

Problem Explained: Whilst many people are familiar with metrics such as hits, ‘bounce rate’ is a hugely important metric of your website and potentially your business. Bounce rate is a measurement of how many visitors are rejecting your site. They land on your site and ‘bounce out’ without reading anything. A bounce rate of 50% means you’re losing half of your visitors without reading anything.

There’s a double penalty: Bounce rates show Google that your site is unloved and not what searches are looking for, which will ultimately mean your site losing visibility in Google. 

Bounce rates can be influenced by a number of things and are a whole different subject we’d happily spend hours discussing, but the single biggest thing you can do today is to reduce the time it takes for your website’s pages to load.

Example: In my clients case – let’s call them “Zoom Microscopes” –  the first thing that struck me was how slow their website was. After hooking up Google Analytics, a bounce rate of > 60% was observed (meaning 60% of visitors land on the site and ‘bounce out’ without reading anything). I suspected that many of these visitors didn’t even wait for the pages to load. Zoom Microscopes, like many companies, use cheap, shared web hosting from reassuringly well-known web hosting companies. This particular hosting company – one of the most well-known hosting companies – unfortunately hosts it’s UK sites in Amsterdam. (There is minor loss in performance from being located a little way from the UK, but in terms of SEO, a website hosted in Holland is sending confusing signals to the search engines, particularly if non-UK domains are used, such as .com.)

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Crescent Digital Ltd,
48, Chapeldown Road
Torpoint
Cornwall
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Recent Comments

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    Verena

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    Thanks for the explaination. I did everything accordingly, and now waiting for the 24h to pass for it to show up in my Analytics. However, the small one-sentence confirmation is not appearing anymore, when someone fills in the contact form on our website. Could you please give some input on how to fix this?

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    stevenba

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    Unfortunately not I’m afraid. It does vary with the type of activity and LinkedIn frequently change their policies, but at present, LinkedIn’s maximum is 30 days.
    Regards
    Steve

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    N_jarolmasjed

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    Hi there.thank you for your website
    Is there any possibility to see all my updates in linkedin from the bigining?I had been linkedin member for about 3 years or so and .I had shared simething that I need it now and unfortunately I lose to have them any where else they were gone. I’d have been grateful if you can guide me
    Many thanks