In today’s world, if you want to run a successful business, your website must be appealing, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing. It is essential for customer attraction and satisfaction. In addition, more people now use online platforms for business discovery, buying, and selling. To cater to all these needs and to remain competitive, your website must stand out and avoid common web design mistakes.
8 Common Web Design Mistakes to Avoid
An excellent web design attains a business’s good impression and credibility. However, we also make some common mistakes when designing a website. The good news is that we can avoid them beforehand or eliminate them during web development. Let’s delve into what some of these web design mistakes are.
1. Overcrowded Websites
Excellent web design should not have congested designs. Crowded websites contain too many elements and are loaded with many texts, images, extremely bright colors, and animations. These are not pleasing, and they overwhelm customers.
A well-designed website should portray its intended message directly without too much clutter. It takes precaution to offer efficient visual hierarchies. Space and sizing of all elements are very crucial for user interaction. You can also follow color psychology when it comes to design.
2. Confusing Brand Messaging
Customers will leave a website if they cannot immediately gauge your business and brand. This increases the bounce rate, and you do not want that for the health of your website. You must communicate your brand values, beliefs, and what merits you bring through your website.
This is one way through which you can differentiate your business from the competition. Make sure that you are not focused on addressing your agenda but on the targeted audience. You need to send a strong brand message so that visitors understand their reason(s) for decision-making.
3. Not Prioritizing on Navigation
Ignoring navigation is one of the prevalent web design mistakes web designers may make. If your website is poorly planned, you will suffer customer drop-off rates. An unstructured website is not appealing, and it only wastes time. Therefore, if you are developing a website with multiple web pages, you must group them using one navigation bar separated by different categories. Web visitors can quickly visit the specific page they are searching for.
4. Failure to Optimize Load Times
If you have a slow-loading website, you will undoubtedly lose the visitor. Everybody wants to access information fast. Slow loading pages also significantly affect your SEO rankings. For an existing website, the developer must always look for and incorporate ways to improve the load times. You need to score higher on Google PageSpeed Insights. If the design is new, fast load time should be a priority.
5. Having No SEO or Analytics
SEO and analytics are the best tools to measure and track website performance. SEO will ensure that your website ranks high on the search result pages. Analytics can show you average visitor durations and what users do on the page. With analytics, you can infer whether new element additions are being used as intended. With such, you can identify what is causing a particular problem and work to fix it.
You can use Google Analytics to gather valuable information regarding user behavior and work towards tracking conversions.
6. Lack of Call to Action (CTA) Buttons
Most websites are sale funnels and are primarily used for marketing. They are created to make visitors perform specific actions like Add to Cart, Sign Up, Buy Now, etc. If you’re going to convert visitors into customers, you need to have precise CTAs on every page. Having no clear CTA can cause you to miss out on potential leads. However, do not overdo the CTAs, as that may irritate prospects.
7. Difficult to Find Contact Information
Another common web design mistake is that some website owners do not directly showcase their contact information. But clients and customers want to get in touch easily. Working too hard to find out your contact details is frustrating. Therefore, have clear and easily accessible information about how your clients can contact you. You can use a CTA for the same.
8. Missing Out on Responsive Design Approach
Having a design that can be navigated through different devices offers flexibility for customers. Today, a customer will make a first impression about your website based on how it appears on their handheld device. Therefore, your website should be responsive across desktops, tablets, and mobile platforms. If need be, you may design separate web layouts for different platforms.
This provides optimal user experience and increases responsiveness. If a visitor can navigate the website easily with no disruptions, they are likely to come back.
The Bottom Line: How to Avoid Common Web Design Mistakes
Web design is an integral part of every business. It builds traffic and generates sales. To remain competitive in today’s business world, you must ensure that your website looks great and is functional. If you address the common web design mistakes highlighted above, you will boost the potential of your website to the maximum. To err is human but initially avoiding mistakes is divine.
Failing to prioritize mobile responsiveness, neglecting intuitive navigation, overcrowding with irrelevant content, and ignoring page loading speed are just a few pitfalls to sidestep