Remarkably, 28% of small businesses still don’t have a website? A website is a great way for small businesses to distinguish themselves from their competitors as well as promote and sell their services and products.
While having any old website is better than not having one at all, there are a lot of web design mistakes that can be made that can drive customers to competitor sites.
When designing business websites, there are a number of things businesses will want to avoid to ensure that their prospective customers have a good user experience rather than a frustrating one.
Let’s take a look at 10 of the most common web design mistakes.
1. Not Having a Mobile-Friendly Website
These days, it isn’t enough for a website to work perfectly on a computer. Almost everyone these days uses their smartphone or device to access the Internet. This means that a website needs to be functional on any kind of device no matter what.
2. Not Having a Fast Loading Time
Most people won’t wait around for a website allowed for more than five seconds. If a business doesn’t have a fast loading time for their web pages, many of their prospective customers will bounce off their site and had over to their competitor’s sites.
Slow loading times are often the result of inexperienced designers and developers. Sometimes sites are overloaded with animations, videos, or pictures that cause the site to load slowly.
3. Having Too Much Going On
Sometimes people try to put way too much information on one page. This can create a confusing visual environment that leads their audience to wander away in search of a more straightforward site.
Users need to be able to understand what a business is and what they do in only a couple of seconds after they show up. If they can’t, the process can become frustrating and they will just leave.
Businesses also don’t want their website to have too much text, videos, and images that slow loading time and create a chaotic visual environment.
4. Having Too Little Going On
While it is important to not have too much going on on a site, it’s also important to not have the opposite problem. If there is so little information on a website that users don’t understand the product or service, this is going to hurt the business.
Minimalism is a trend in web design and for good reason. However, it is not a good idea to have a website that leaves customers guessing. If the website only had a couple of short sentences and simple, stock imagery, there is a good chance that visitors will bounce off and find a website that has more going on.
Hiring a web design agency is often the best way to avoid these mistakes. Here are 7 factors to consider when choosing a web design service.
5. Not Having a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy
A beautiful website is a wonderful thing, but if a brand doesn’t have a solid digital marketing strategy no one will ever know that it’s there. It can be a good idea to hook up with a professional digital marketing agency so that they can take care of their SEO and content marketing needs. This way, they can focus on driving traffic to a website while the business owner can focus on what they do best: running their business.
It’s also very important to prioritize creating high-quality content as a part of a business’s digital marketing strategy. Video marketing and content marketing are a major part of the digital marketing world, with many companies these days maintaining blogs.
It isn’t enough to just have a blog. The content a brand produces needs to be original, valuable, and useful to the reader. If it’s bland and regurgitated, or worse yet, filled with grammatical and spelling errors, it won’t give people confidence in the brand.
Content is a major part of the voice of a company. People are consciously or unconsciously deciding whether or not a brand is high-quality or obviously unprofessional from the content produced. This includes both the visual aesthetics of the blog as well as the tone of voice and quality of the writing.
As a side note, another common web design mistake is to design a website before having a fleshed-out brand identity. It’s important to have consistency in branding across a website, products, and physical storefront or office. If there isn’t, it can create a disconnect and sense of unease in the audience.
6. Neglecting to Include Contact Information
It’s hard to believe, but one common web design mistake is to neglect to include contact information. If there is nothing else on a website, it should always give the customer information about how to contact the company. This is particularly true if a business has an incredibly sparse website that leads customers with many questions they want to be answered.
There should always be a “contact us” page that is only one click away. It’s also a good idea to have the contact information listed at the bottom of every webpage on the site.
7. Having Broken Links
When launching a website, it is essential to make sure that there are no broken links. A website that has links that don’t work, there’s a high likelihood that the user immediately assumes that the business was at best unprofessional and at worst a total scam. This is the last thing that a brand wants is their potential customers to take away from their experience on the website.
8. Being Visually Unattractive
Web design is not a field where brands can simply throw things against the wall to see what sticks. There is a logic to web design that factors in aesthetics, tone, branding, and psychology.
When a website is filled with ugly or relevant images, has a poorly chosen color scheme, or has no rhyme or reason for the use of fonts, people will notice. It makes a company seem less legitimate and reputable and gives an unfortunate first impression of the brand.
It’s very important to pay attention to color and contrast when designing a website. It can be very offputting for a website to be overloaded with very bright colors, for example. It’s also essential that there is enough contrast between the background and tax that it can be easily read.
9. Lack of Organization
A website should be organized in a way that users can find the information they are looking for with hardly any effort. It’s important to understand how much information people have access to these days and therefore how impatient they are when it comes to searching for what they’re looking for.
It’s important to remember navigation when adding new pages. During the design and launch of the website, navigation is often planned carefully. However, one needs to consider navigation just as much if not more when they add more pages over time.
When producing content as a part of a marketing strategy, make sure that blog posts are filled with relevant visual data and images, broken up into subheaders, and utilize bullet points and lists.
Remember to keep plenty of white space around text to make information easy to digest. It can be tempting to try and use up all of the available real estate when designing business websites. However, people are easily overwhelmed by walls of text or not enough white space, so always lean towards leaving more negative space than one would think necessary.
Pages that don’t have enough white space tend to look unprofessional. People are usually scanning websites rather than reading every word.
10. Not Having a Call-to-Action
Lastly, it’s important to always have a call to action. This is going to be different for every website, but once a business has gotten a prospective customer on their site, they want to drive them to take further action. If they don’t, they will most likely leave without signing up for their email list, browsing their products, or reading about the services they offer.
Businesses Should Avoid These Web Design Mistakes At All Costs!
When it comes time to create a website, many people don’t realize just how difficult designing business websites are. There are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of different aspects of a site that can drive away potential customers.
One way to avoid these web design mistakes is to hire a professional web design agency. They will have the experience and the knowledge to create a functional, fast, flexible, and stylish website for a small business.
Is it time to hire a web design agency? If so, contact Killerspots Agency today!
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