Unclutter Your Website
There’s a lot to be said in this day and age of rabid consumerism for decluttering. There are websites and books galore that will help you declutter your possessions so that you can have a neater, simpler existence and basically get more room and space to breathe in. If you’ve never tried decluttering your physical possessions, you should give it a try. It can give you more energy, confidence, and free you up to pursue the things you really care about instead of just focusing on hoarding and taking care of all of your stuff. Have a website? The same principles apply there. A website with just too much going on in terms of graphics, content, or business ventures can actually drive away all of the readers you are trying so hard (too hard) to attract. Here are a few areas of your website “house” that can easily become too cluttered and some simple ways of addressing this all-too-common problem:
Design
A cluttered website design can be one of the biggest and fastest turn-offs to new visitors to your site. Finicky web surfers typically decide within a few split seconds whether or not they want to stay on your site, and therefore the importance of having a clean and attractive design cannot be overstated. Even if you can’t afford to hire a web designer right away, keep in mind the importance of keeping things decluttered. Read some design books if you are so inclined, but at the very least try to focus on only adding the graphics and site categories that absolutely need to be there. Continually ask yourself, “Is there anything I can get rid of?”
Content Focus
This might be a little less obvious to the casual observer of your site, but a clear and strong content focus is just as important in the end as a unified design focus. What is your site about? If you can’t answer that question in one concise sentence (or less), then you might need to work on bringing a little focus to the content you post. Don’t try to appeal to everyone and don’t try to write about everything under the sun that interests you. Get very clear on why people would come to your site, and work on fulfilling a few simple needs for those people.
Traffic / Marketing Approach
Obviously you want to do as much as possible to get the word out about your site and what you are all about, but don’t spread yourself too thin. If you are trying to do everything you’ve ever heard anyone suggest to get traffic, and still failing, you might want to regroup and focus your efforts on doing just a few things really well. For example, instead of using every avenue of social media only half-heartedly, focus on building a really strong Twitter and Facebook presence, or make a point of becoming prominent in just a couple of your favorite forums. Once you have done that, you can branch out, and you might be surprised at how your Twitter success snowballs into subsequent Facebook rock-stardom, or vice versa.
