In an online environment (or any environment, for that matter), impressions matter. Unfortunately on the web, you have no other way to make up for a bad first impression or otherwise substitute an incentive in lieu of a negative experience. Because of this, it is very important to ensure that your website, brand and any/all connected portals are delivering a professional, modern and user-friendly experience to all who visit them. If you want to avoid contributing to a loss in respect, business or traffic for your brand, then continue reading to find out about three sure-fire ways to end up doing the exact opposite.

Your Social Media Presence Isn’t

All too many brands are completely insistent upon maintaining a website and nothing else. After all, they believe, why direct traffic across multiple sources when they can be brought to one location instead? This is flawed logic, of course, with bad impressions being made upon people all the time as a result. Social media helps brands with pinging users across multiple fronts – users that in many cases would have never discovered the brand in question. The lack of a social media presence, considering that it is free and easy to maintain, will give many the impression that your brand lacks an understanding of the modern world and is otherwise generally inadequate. By maintaining at least one or two social media accounts and connecting them to your website, you can avoid this fate.

Your Website Is Ugly

Just because you have a comprehensive web presence doesn’t mean that it is a good one. Where many brands can ultimately hurt themselves is through the design or layout of their websites. On most social media platforms, the look and feel of your presence can only be customized to a limited degree and is therefore familiar to all who use it. On your very own website, however, you have total control to create whatever (including a hot mess). You’ll want to ensure that your website is both aesthetically pleasing to those who visit and functional so that others can garner from it what you want them to find. Ignoring a situation in which a site may be deemed ugly, out-of-date, too complicated or lacking in key content will only create bad first impressions and destroy credibility in the eyes of your visitors.

Your Website Doesn’t Embrace Mobile

For better or worse, the internet is becoming increasingly mobile. For those of us who have adapted to this change, we understand just why it is so important. More than one-third of all internet traffic now comes through mobile devices. If someone is accessing your website, then there’s a good chance that they are doing so via mobile. Sites that do not have a mobile-responsive design of some sort will no doubt face the proposition of pinging users with a negative impression. If people have to pinch and zoom to read every little piece of content on your website from their mobile devices, then they’ll likely just go somewhere else to find what it is they need.