Web design is not just about making your site look pretty, it can also make a significant impact on customer usage, engagement and even in marketing and optimizing your site for search engines.
Mistakes however can make you lose visitors and even sales for your site. These mistakes could be as trivial as typographical errors, improper and/or broken links, or it could also be as technical as coding mistakes that can hurt your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
A web designer should put a lot of thought into every part of the web design – and this is best done by avoiding the most common mistakes in web designing such as:
- Being too minimalist.
A cluttered web design is definitely a no-no, but even if minimalism is on trend right now, this does not also mean that you should overdo it. Using a lot of white space is good, but you still have to make sure that everything is organized and that the content and information placed in the website is still complete – despite being short and limited.
This is not all about placing and design however. A web designer should partner with a content creator and marketing strategist to ensure that all the important elements of the site are placed on the right spots, and it is not just being de-cluttered for the sake of minimalism.
- Using excessive videos, animations and music.
Audio, videos and animations (such as GIFs) – though they might make your website look cool, they can however significantly slow down your site. It could turn off site visitors and can even affect your search engine rankings because of the page’s slow loading time.
The solution of course is to simply avoid using too much of these types of media content. If possible, just stick to images or plain photos instead. If you want to add something a bit animated on your page, use revolving banners or images instead. Adding one video is also alright, but it is much preferable to not set them on auto-play.
- Improper ad placements.
Ads are generally a pain, but it is impossible to take them away, especially if they are your site’s main source of income. To make them less annoying and intrusive (and possibly making them more effective for visitors instead), you must learn to place these ads properly. Don’t place them on areas where it can interfere with the actual content of your site. If you make use of pop-ups, make sure it does not cover a large part of your site – and that the exit button can be easily located.
- Complicated Navigation
The moment your site visitors are interested in what you have to offer, tendency is they might be looking for more information about your products, services, contact numbers and even your company profile. And if these pages cannot be easily located within the home page, customers can quickly lose interest. So if you don’t want to lose potential customers, make sure links to important parts of your website such as the FAQ page and contact page can be easily located.
- Inconsistency in design.
Inconsistency in design can also affect the navigability of your site, it might also create a confusion in branding and corporate image. As much as possible, just use one template for all the web pages – it will not just make the job easier, but it is also beneficial for site visitors and customers as well.
Bottom line, just ensure that your website is easy and simple to use. If the ads on the site annoy you, it will annoy other people even more. If it is visually distressing, it will surely be visually unappealing to site visitors as well. Make sure you test the site via User Acceptance Tests (UAT) before finally launching it to the public. Don’t also forget that more and more people are accessing websites via smartphones nowadays – so you might also want to make sure that your web design is also compatible with smaller screen sizes.
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