the disorganized: Therapy for The website that creates confusion

Have you ever been in a used book store that has books everywhere? They are on shelves, stacked on tables and in boxes on the floor. Everyone is pretty sure there is some good stuff in there, but finding it? That's almost impossible. Is that a good description of your website?

Websites have a Disorganized personality when they've be redesigned multiple times without culling any of the dead weight content. Pages and articles are added over years by multiple people using different naming conventions, inconsistent tags and categories, and then crammed into a menu that when you click it reaches down below the middle of the page.

The big problem with the Disorganized Website Personality? People think the same of your business.

Menu development is an important part of CRO (customer response optimization), which is right up there with SEO (search engine optimization) because how easily people can find what they are looking for will eventually affect both your conversion rates and your visit rates. Frustrated people tend to leave websites that are confusing very quickly, and Google tracks that behavior.

The Disorganized Website Personality is allowed to arise for a few reasons: 1) the website owner doesn't understand that every visitor is having their first customer service experience when they visit the website, and so a seamless experience is never a focus of web development; or 2) because the web developer believes that having three different kinds of complex menus with multiple placements on the website is a good idea; also 3) analytics are not in use to identify pages and content that should be buried or removed.

If you still don't believe that your website might be suffering from this problem:

Look at the menus- are they longer than 3 deep?
Look at the home page- does it give me 2-3 options that focus on the top customer needs?
Look at the way the website is laid out and ask, "does this layout make me carsick?", or "If this website was a map that I needed to save my life, would I live?"

If you haven't takEN the Website Personality Quiz, complete it now to further understand your website's personality

Unless your target customer is the same kind of person that loves to crawl through cluttered garages looking for treasure (and there are some people who enjoy that), you need to consider getting some help for your troubled website personality. If you were tracking analytics, you would know that most of what you are carrying on your website isn't producing any leads.

One big thing that you can do to Help your website

The number one rule of website planning, according to the Story Website Therapist, is "Don't make people think." Use organization, titles and buttons that are intuitive and make sense without analysis. There are two easy places to start: First, look at your menus. Work to condense your menus so they are no longer than three deep. Second, consider ditching some of the pages. We know that it's hard to let those lonely pages go, but someone has to do it.

You may also need to consider a redesign, if the layout itself feels cluttered and the organization of the website is too far gone. Launchpad websites can address this problem.