Are you currently building your website or making some adjustments to an existing site? Here is a list of 10 website design mistakes you should avoid at all costs.
Everyone wants their website be perfect, but very few of us have any award winning designers to call for advice (except you, dear reader, you’ve got BRANDING FOR THE PEOPLE). You’ve probably heard an earful from the amatuers about how to get clicks and convert eyeballs to leads, but here, we are going to help you build your BRAND online. Here are the top 10 website design mistakes, or landmines to avoid, as compiled by our website designer Lidya Toscano.
01. Having a home button on your website:
Having a home button on your main navigation is a thing of the past, and is one of the most common website design mistakes we have personally witnessed over the years. Everyone knows and it should be pretty obvious that the logo is usually your go to place to click whenever you want to come back to the homepage in case you get lost or want to start navigating the website from the start.
Having a home button steals room for more important navigation items like your mission, your vision or the things that actually make you money, like your products.
02. NOT having enough Calls To Action:
Your website can be making you a lot of money, but if it’s not, it’s more likely because it doesn’t have enough Call To Actions, also known as CTA, and more popularly known as “Buttons.” These are essential for your website as they direct and tell the user what to do, where to go, how to do it and most importantly they play a big role in helping your website make you money. You can think of them as traffic signs, as they direct you to where you want to go, and to where it’s going to be turned into profit and/or long client relations.
Here are some examples of CTAs:
03. Having weak SEO or not having it at all:
What is SEO?
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is a set of rules that every website and blog should follow in order to help their visibility in search engines and help their search ranking.
Why is it important?
SEO plays a big role in your website visibility, and not having it, or not doing it well can impact your website’s ability to appear in search engines.
Although search engines will throw thousands of results, most users don’t even get to the second page, and most of them religiously trust these search engines to have the best choice within the first page, therefore most of them don’t even click past the 5th result listed. So the higher your website ranks the more traffic your website will get and the more money you are likely to make.
04. NOT capturing leads:
You have spent many dollars in campaigns to promote you and your site, all the way from Google ads to Facebook ads, to writing copy, to doing public speaking etc., but if you aren’t turning the visitors on your site into email addresses and phone numbers, you might as well just feed your money into an empty soda machine.
If you want your website to generate business, then it is crucial that you’re capturing leads through your website. Simple ways to capturing leads of potential future customers is to have your visitors fill out a web form where they provide you with their name and email in exchange for a free give or service, or to invite them to participate in a 10 day challenge of some sort, with daily motivation sent to their inbox or phone. Once you’ve got their info, you can market to them to your heart’s content.
05. Don’t hide your contact information:
One of the biggest website design mistakes are to hide your contact information. Unless you don’t want anyone inquiring to do business with you, you shouldn’t be keeping your contact information secret. The most visible and best places to put your contact information is in the footer, you can just include a phone number and an email or a contact page linked from your main nav or a site map at the footer of your website page. Another popular spot for a phone number? Across the top in the navigation!
06. NOT having a mobile compatible website:
This is one of the biggest website design mistakes there are, we are now living in the year of 2018 where, according to this Mobile Fact Sheet, 95% of Americans own some sort of cellphone and 77% own a smartphone. This means that people are spending more time on their tablets and smartphones, and 80% them have admitted to making impulsive purchases while on their phone, and, they will do it again! If you don’t believe us, take a look at this Huffpost article 5 Reasons You Absolutely Must Optimize Your Website for Mobile.
Another reason to optimize your website to be mobile friendly is that Google penalizes non-friendly mobile websites by lowering their search ranking and this directly hurts your business if you make your money by generating leads online. Want more info? Read this: Google Boosts Mobile-Friendly Algorithm, Further Penalizing Non-Mobile Sites.
07. Don’t Stop Scrolling:
When it comes to designing a website, infinite scrolling is often looked at as a negative feature by old school designers. But, look around, everybody is doing it! You are actually doing it right now! Especially when it comes to mobile websites, scrolling is not a bad thing and it’s a thing people are very used to doing. People do it everyday and love to do it on all of their Social Media accounts such Facebook and Instagram. So avoid this common website design mistake and don’t limit your content by thinking that scrolling is a bad thing.
08. Embed text in your images:
Another very common website design mistake is to embed text in images, search engines can’t read embedded text in images. If that’s your issue you could be hurting your search ranking and might as well not even include the text on the image at all, since having it embedded is equivalent to not having text at all. And if you still don’t understand why SEO is important go back and read point 3.
09. NOT including your social media:
Not including your social media on your site, is plain bad. Adweek states that on average a person spends 5 years of their life navigating their social media accounts.
Now, why should you have social media you ask? Many companies are taking advantage of social media to advertise products, promote services and make announcements which eventually leads to profits. So why would you not include yours?
10. Inconsistent branding
Now this is our area of expertise and we know a bad and inconsistent branding when we see one. Not only is this visually bad, but you can be confusing your users by making them think they’re on a different page every time they make a click and users will be more likely to not trust you neither return to your site.
Here is a list of signs to tell if your branding is inconsistent or not:
- Pixelated photos and graphics.
- Not having a color system.
- Having too many different fonts, and font colors and sizes.
- Your photos are different styles, basically not having photography guidelines.
- Not having a brand voice and personality.
If you need professional help building your website click here for a complimentary consult.
