A great business website can do wonders for your public image, marketing success, and overall profits. A well designed website should instantly attract the attention of your customers, direct them to the information they need with ease, and provide a comfortable and pleasant user experience from start to finish. When you make mistakes with your business website, your entire company can suffer as a result. Avoid these all too common web design mistakes if you want your website to be a boost to your business, rather than a hindrance.
- Your customers can’t find you through their search engine. When it comes to attracting customers, ranking well through popular search engines is key. Some businesses put all the focus on attractive design when building a website and neglect the all-important SEO Forgetting keywords and other optimization strategies will weaken your Google ranking and give the competition the edge when customers search online.
- You don’t provide up to date customer information. This is such a simple mistake, but one commonly made even by large, established businesses. Customers frequently visit business websites with the intention of finding contact information so that they can get in touch with you, ask important questions, and hopefully make orders. If your contact information isn’t clearly provided around your website in multiple locations, or if it’s out of date, you’ll instantly lose business.
- You make navigation too difficult. User experience is essential when it comes to building a successful business website, and the navigation tools provided will make a significant difference. Build a navigation bar into every page of your website so that customers can always find what they need quickly. Place it in a visible location on each page, and use a bold, readable font that comes through visibly regardless of screen resolution.
- You forget to include a search bar. Another aspect of simple navigation is the all-important search bar. Search functionality means that your customer can find exactly what they’re looking for without browsing for longer than they need to. Your website should definitely have one.
- You get over-creative with colours and fonts. Newcomers to web design often get overwhelmed by all of the font and colour options available to them and go overboard. This leaves the website looking confusing to the eye, and can appear unprofessional. Try to be as consistent as possible with fonts and colour schemes across your entire website, and avoid the temptation to throw in too many italics and bolded words. Simplicity is always best.
- You forget to consider mobile responsive design. With websites now being punished by Google for neglecting mobile-friendly design, you’d think that every business would be designing their websites accordingly. Sadly, this isn’t the case. Ensure that your site looks as perfect on a mobile device as it does through a desktop screen so that every customer will have a flawless user experience.
- You overload the page with text content. Too much text on a page makes it difficult for your customer to find what they’re looking for. Unless they’re reading the news, nobody wants to scroll through paragraphs of text, so keep this in mind when organising your website’s tech White space and well-placed images can be far more powerful.