4 Reasons Why Most Websites Will Epically Fail

Over 500 new websites are created every minute, the bad news is 99% of them will fail

Yep, you read it correctly! Everyday thousands of websites are launched, but sadly 99 percent of them fail. They fail to inspire or persuade their target audience and most even fail to even communicate the basic point of why their website is there to begin with. We’ve all seen them — boring, confusing, cluttered and lifeless.

There are a lot of reasons why most websites will fail to capture and engage their intended audience. The following are the top four worst offenders:

FAIL Reason #1 - Generic

Many Websites struggle to communicate value and fail to engage visitors and drive traffic. This often happens because the site has nothing distinctive or unique to separate it from the millions of other sites and appears generic to the user. Value and uniqueness does not just come from great design. It comes from the fundamental ideas that make up the whole package.

Websites are powerful, valuable tools, but the way many of them are set up, with a blue and white template, nonstop “All About Me” rhetoric,  hundreds of clickable parts, and absence of any kind of marketing strategy or creativity is only screaming, “Run Away” to your visitors. It’s overwhelmingly generic and a bad foundation for success. Inevitably, you end up with a bunch of web pages that are bland, confusing, uninteresting, cluttered, unclear and absolutely flavorless.

FAIL reason #2 - Assumptions

Many websites are created and developed to assume that when the target audience sees it they will automatically:

• Know what the site is for
• Understand what the site owner is trying to convey
• Process and remember the miles of content
• Know exactly what it is we want them to do

The human brain these days is a distracted brain. It has to quickly and efficiently filter out tons of data and images. It isn’t possible to digest and retain all of that information. So if you put together a website ASSUMING that everyone will know, understand, see and remember truckloads of cookie cutter information put in front of them....well, what do we get when we assume?

FAIL reason #3 - Noise

We have all seen those excruciating websites that are a chaotic mess of words, pictures, logos, colors, fancy animations and transitions. Basically, they are a lot of noise.

The human brain can only process and hold onto roughly seven items for approximately 10-15 seconds at a time. Think of a Post-It note size of information, and here we are creating websites that would give the size of the Bible a run for its money. Our brain chemistry won’t allow for this, so creating simple, clean, straightforward, bite-sized, visually appealing sites for your audience will make it easier to attract and engage your target audience.

A study conducted at the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University that measured people's brain activity while they addressed an increasing amount of information (i.e., noise) found that as people increased information intake, the data load became too much, it was as though a breaker in the brain was triggered and suddenly shut down.

The more choices we are given, the more tired and less effective we become.

We are naturally optimized for task switching. When we switch between tasks, our brains must halt any processing of the current rule set and load a new rule set for the next task. This happens quickly. But halting, unloading, loading, and restarting can take a toll. To increase your performance or to enhance your ability to learn, it is important to focus on the task at hand.

FAIL reason #4 – Documents Are Not Visual

If you make a website filled with words, quotes and bullet points your audience will read about the first paragraph and then they’ll move on. Your website design and content should be balanced, not too much verbiage and not too much imagery. If your website is clean and balanced your audience’s attention won’t drift because there is appeal for both sides of the brain.

So, now you know the top 4 reasons most websites don’t succeed. The first step in any form of “recovery” is to admit that you have a problem. So go ahead, we’ll wait…

The next step is to ask for help.

Need help creating a profitable website that won’t fail?

Let us show you the many ways efelle can help you enhance your marketing with web design. With years of creative, technical and marketing expertise, our team can help you reach your marketing and design goals with options you probably didn’t even know existed. We offer services in Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue and Tacoma, Washington. Call us at 206.384.4909 or use our online contact form to arrange for a free web design consultation