Common Mistakes of Web Design

Let’s get straight to the point: your website acts as a major marketing tool for your business. It not only markets your brand, but it can successfully draw an audience and produce sales. For those who are just starting a business, the website is probably the prime source of familiarizing people with the products/services offered. However, poor planning can lead to mistakes that affect your business negatively. We’ve come up with seven no-no’s to avoid when designing a website. 

Losing Site Of Who Your Audience Is

It’s easy to get lost in the excitement of starting a new business and all of the decisions to be made. Quite a few entrepreneurs want to immediately take their idea and create a profitable business. It’s been known to happen to quickly have a site designed and rushed to see it go live, but all the while, they’ve lost sight of just who their target audience is. This is a fatal mistake. It’s important to focus that excitement on carefully researching your demographics and finding out what kind of audience you want to attract. Then you can get crazy with designing the perfect website that will make it easy for your audience to navigate and understand your site. 

Offering A Wide Range of Features

It’s easy to want to offer your audiences everything under the sun, but please resist that temptation. Many startups think it’s best to offer as many features on their website as possible, with the idea that the more offered, the more value to the users. Wrong! This has the exact opposite effect. Too many features on the homepage will not only make it look cluttered and poorly designed, but also make it too overwhelming for the visitor. The better option is to focus on only those features that are absolutely necessary and essential to your website. And be really careful when adding non-essential items.

Keyword Stuffing

KeywordsWe all know that the better ranking you receive on search engines, the better visibility for your business and brand, which ultimately leads to better sales. It’s mighty temping to “help” those rankings by stuffing content with keywords. Please read this carefully - BIG MISTAKE. This can only hurt you as you will be penalized by search engines in terms of losing page rank, or worse, being banned from their site. Instead, a safe rule of thumb is that your content should roughly be made up of 2-5% of relevant keywords. 

Where’s the Contact Information?

This is a common mistake often seen in new business websites - no contact information. Visitors want to be able to easily contact the business, not be given the runaround of filling out a form to get in touch with the business. Make your information, such as phone, email, address, etc., easily accessible for your visitors. 

Your Website Looks Appealing, But That’s About It

Many fall into the trap of worrying about making their website look appealing to visitors, but often times, that is all they worry about. Don’t fall into this trap. Websites that are aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but don’t produce a good user experience, equal bad news for you. Websites that are hard to navigate are a big turn off to customers and this will ultimately affect your website traffic. While it’s absolutely okay to have a stunning website, make sure you remember to include easy navigation and clear calls to action.

It’s All About Trust

For startup companies who haven’t established trust and recognition with their targeted audience, it’s very important to remember that you need to build up trust. When designing your website, you need to make sure your brand looks trustworthy to the eyes of the consumer. One great way to do this is to include client testimonies. Help build your audience base with great reviews about your products and services. Also include social media on your site to make connections with potential customers and build trust and relationships. 

Ignoring Mobile Users

It’s no secret that more and more people use their mobile devices to do research online.  These days, it’s absolutely critical that you make your website mobile-friendly. Not doing so will potentially lose you a large share of your audience. Incorporate a responsive design to ensure that your site is able to be viewed across multiple screen sizes. This will help you attract a larger audience who prefer to use their phones and tablets to search the web.

It’s pretty easy to fall into any of the traps listed above, but if you are aware of them from the get go, you will be able to design a website that will attract visitors and generate leads and sales.