Warning! This article is not for the faint hearted, thinned skinned or easily offended. If you are, you’re probably guilty of one or more of these 7 Deadly Sins. Lol
Lets face it, first impressions matter. Your website is the online face of your daycare business and it represents YOU.
If your website looks as though it was thrown together by your two year old, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and that you couldn’t care less about quality.
You want a high quality user-friendly website that showcases your daycare business in the best light possible.
Avoid these 7 common pitfalls like the plague when creating a website for your home daycare business:
1.) Attack Of The Pop-ups – Need I say more? Lol
2.) Banner Overload – If you want to place banners on your website, then do so. Just remember that banners are graphics and can slow down the loading time of your website. Limit them to just a few, and by all means, make sure that they’re related to the content of your website.
3.) Free Web Addresses – If your website address is of the free variety and is so long that you have no hope of ever remembering it or fitting it on your business cards, please invest in a domain name and have it redirected to your existing website. They are cheap, easy to set up and give instant credibility to your business.
4.) Free Web Hosting – Don’t use a free web host if you want to be taken seriously. Many of the free web hosting services place their own advertisements on your website. This is no small thing. You will be working hard to drive traffic to your website. Do you really want visitors to get distracted upon arriving at your site by ads for another company?
5.) Music – Have you ever visited a website and nearly jumped out of your seat at the unexpected sound of some random nursery rhyme blaring from your speakers? I certainly have on more than one occasion. Endlessly looping audio will drive visitors away, so make sure your visitors have the option to control the volume, stop or pause the music.
6.) Navigation – The layout of your website should be consistent and organized in design throughout all pages. Make sure all your web pages look the same and the websites navigation is in the same location on each page and is easy to find, read and to follow.
7.) Slow Loading Pages – What do you do when you arrive at a website that takes too long to load? If you’re anything like me, you move on. There’s nothing more annoying to a visitor than a slow, unresponsive website. When visitors have to wait more than a few seconds to see any information, guess what? They get impatient and simply move on, never to return. Make sure that your images are properly compressed so that the download time is not compromised due to large images.
I’ve had a chance to witness the good, the bad, the ugly, and the really ugly when it comes to website design in the home daycare community and one thing I know for sure is that less is truly more.
