10 Most Common Mistakes Found in Horse Website

We have viewed 100s of horse businesses' websites from breeders to tack stores to stables as well as 1000s of website from other industries.

In general, we find horse related websites to be the among the worst websites you find on the web.

The interesting thing in horse business websites is: the quality of the websites improves the further the business is removed from the actual horses. Tack stores sites, for example, are vastly better than breeder sites. One further step removed; magazines sites are generally better than tack stores.

In the following chapters we will explore the 10 most common mistakes in horse business websites.

A large percentage of horse business websites have a very unprofessional look and feel. Their overall design is substandard and well below what most people have become to expect when visiting a website.

This says to potential customers about the business: “Hello, we don't have a clue what we are doing. Want to buy my stuff?” The reader will almost always immediately leave that site and move on to businesses that have a more credible image.

Many people make a common mistake thinking that any website is better than no website at all. Studies have shown that is not the case and you are better off having no website than a bad website.

Large picture files greatly slow down how quickly your pages will open and studies show that most visitors will abandon your website before opening a single page. Web users today and more impatient than ever and they expect pages to open fast.

If they do wait, they want the wait to be worth it.

The size of your picture files greatly impacts how fast your web pages open. A very common problem we see in horse business websites is that picture files are way too big. Picture files, like the JPG files that you download from your camera to your computer must be first optimized for the web prior to uploading them to your website. We recently viewed some sites that took several minutes to open up and the cause was large, non-optimized pictures.

Pictures are critical to the user's experience, but they must load fast.

The perplexing thing about many horse websites is they are plagued with bad pictures of horses.

The most common mistakes are: photos are out of aspect ratio, the lighting is bad, the main subject of the photo is lost in the clutter of the background objects, the photo is unflattering to the subject or product, and poor cropping.

Shockingly, the worst of all are photos of horses for sale. My gosh, it seems like people rollout of bed, half hung-over, snap a picture from the hip and slap it out on the web. We have seen enough gigantic horse noses, heads, and rear-ends, to make you think you would have more luck selling road kill.

We won't even get started about wondering why there are more pictures of people's dogs than horses on some of these sites...but it does cause pause for wonder.

The important thing about content is that is what gets you found in Google and other search engines.

Like all industries, the competition to be listed on the first page of a Google search is extremely high as more than 80% people never go beyond the first page when they search.

Having interesting and constantly changing content will improve your rankings in searches. We generally see an almost immediate increase in traffic from blogs that is directly related to ranking in searches.

Out of date content is another common problem with horse business website. A common example is horses that were sold a few years ago; guessing that they don’t sell many and are very proud of the one they actually sold. Other examples include sales specials that are months sold, inventory that is no longer carried.

It is very easy for a visitor to a website to spot old content. In fact, visitors usually look for something to date the site's information as a sign of life or that the business is legitimate. You will immediately lose credibility with visitors if they determine your site is out of date and they will leave and shop elsewhere.

As we mentioned in the chapter on “No Interesting Content”, search engine ranking is extremely competitive. Businesses spend big money to get as near the top as possible. But money alone does not get you at the top and it is one area a small player can compete with the big players if they know what to do.

There are many reasons business rank poorly in search results. Lack of content is the primary reason. Others include poorly written page titles, missing page descriptions, duplicate content, out of date content, etc.

Most horse websites we visited lack a message for their target customers. They tend to be targeting everyone in the market. Realizing that your business just cannot serve everyone and clearly defining your target customers is just good business sense.

Websites that are designed to appeal too broadly tend to achieve less effective results in both sales leads and rankings in search results than websites that that go after a specific customer base.

One of our partners always says: "there is a fine line between loveliness and hideous, but it is very easy for others to tell when you crossed that line."

Poor color choices that make it very hard for users to have a pleasant experience. Horse businesses tend to be small, family businesses and therefore very personal and people tend to go with their favorite colors; even if they are outside web norms.

There is nothing wrong with using your favorite colors on your website as long as it creates a pleasant user experience for your visitors.

Displaying ads for companies not your own will cause a whole host of problems for retaining visitors.

This generally happens when businesses use "free" websites packages as well as when a business is trying to generate a little cash by allowing others to place click-through ads on their websites.

Web users immediately become suspicious when they enter a site with ads that display, especially when those ads are not for the business they came to see.

You work so hard to get visitors to come to your website, only to give them a reason to leave before they read anything about your business.

Customers quickly get irritated if there shopping for something when they find something they might be interested in but there is no price of the item on the website.

In our interviews with users, they express deep frustration about having to call to find out the price and most indicate they don't call because they lost trust in that business.

Not putting prices on your website wastes your time and your customer's time, especially if your price is not in their price-range.

Additionally, there is not much of a business advantage in hiding your prices in the horse business with the great number of competitors you likely have locally.