Many people assume that designing business websites just involves picking out the right colours, themes, fonts, and making everything look great. But there is a lot more that goes into creating the perfect website.
In addition to the aesthetic design of your website, you’ll also need to think about the functionality of the site and how users interact with it. But what can go wrong when you’re creating a website?
Here are eight common web design mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Slow Loading Pages
There are two very important reasons why you need a website with a fast loading time. Firstly, users expect pages to load quickly. Chances are if your site doesn’t load within the first few seconds, then your potential visitor will end up leaving and going to a competitor’s website.
Secondly, the likes of Google know just how important page load speeds are to users. For this reason, they’ll penalise any websites that are just not loading quickly enough.
To find out exactly how fast your website is, head to Google’s Page Speed Insights and run a speed test. From there, you’ll get advice about what you can do to speed things up. This might include deleting unused themes and plugins, turning on caching, compressing images, or using a lazy-load plugin.
2. Not Being Mobile-Friendly
Did you know that almost 60% of all web searches are carried out using mobile devices? With this in mind, you can see how important having a mobile-friendly website is.
When a page loads up on a smartphone, the text should be easy to read and images should be scaled to the size of the screen. But on so many websites, this isn’t the case.
If you’re using an off-the-shelf theme for your site, make sure that it looks great on a mobile device. If you have a bespoke site, talk to your web developer about ways to make your site friendly to mobile users.
3. Too Many Links Opening in New Windows
Whenever you have a link, you have two options. You can either open the link in the same window, or you can make it so that the user has to open a new window.
Don’t forget that around 60% of all visitors are mobile users. If they have new windows popping up it can become overwhelming and difficult to manage.
Instead, set your links to open in the same window. That way, users can easily utilise the back button to return to previous pages.
4. No Consideration for Colour and Contrast
If your website is not attractive, you can guarantee most of your users won’t want to look at it and your bounce rate will go through the roof.
Think about the colours that you use for your site. Make sure they are eye-catching, but also think about how well they contrast against the colour of your text and any other colours used on the site.
Avoid having grey text on a black background or having a site that is completely yellow and red. Anything that makes it hard on the eyes should be completely avoided.
5. Disorganised Content
If your content is not laid out in a logical manner, how do you expect your visitors to make sense of it all and find their way around?
Your site needs to be intuitive and easy to navigate. Don’t try to invent the wheel, instead stick to creating a clear and easy-to-use website that is well organised.
6. Not Having a Call to Action
Your site needs plenty of calls to action throughout it. Without a call to action, your visitors won’t know what to do next.
If you have an online store, you’ll need plenty of buttons to click to buy now. If you create regular blog posts, you’ll need to end each post with a call to action that instructs visitors what they should do next.
7. Having Broken Links
Broken links are bad for business. If you’re sending people off to dead ends using links that no longer work, then it will look unprofessional and leave your visitors feeling frustrated.
Use a broken link checking tool to scan through all of the links on your website to make sure they’re all working as they should be.
If you find any broken links, it’s time to either replace the link with a working one or remove it completely.
8. Having Weak SEO
To appear on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll need to use search engine optimisation (SEO).
There are lots of different aspects of your website design that will affect your SEO, and it is important that you focus on these things if you want your page to rank high in the SERPs.
Develop an SEO strategy alongside an SEO company and ensure you give a lot of time and attention to this vital area.
How to Avoid Web Design Mistakes
It is important that you take the time to ensure you’re not making any of these fundamental web design mistakes. One of the best ways that you can ensure you’re not making mistakes is to have your website beta tested by a group of different people.
Having your site looked at and scrutinised will help you create the best site possible.
Another option would be to hire a web design service. At Jumpworks we create websites with purpose. Schedule a call today to discuss your website needs.
