The importance of good website design cannot be overlooked; however, it remains an understated aspect for most businesses and they end up making the most common web design mistakes. Before we elaborate the list of web design mistakes, let’s look at why is it important to have a good website design.
Every business has a face value or a perceived persona in front of the public. A positive perceived value can be achieved by different marketing projections. However, the basic step to create a positive outlook for your businesses is to have an online presence. The efforts you put in the presentation of your businesses website will reflect on how your customers or audience see you. Also, the way a potential customer searches for brands, products or services has changed over the last few decades. This means you will have to put in double the efforts in digital marketing unlike before to rank higher in the search results. And the obvious way to achieve this feat is to have an SEO-optimized website. An SEO-optimized website requires a good web design. Here’s a listing of the common web design mistakes and how to avoid them.
Poor Navigation
The Problem:
The navigation of your website is very critical for on-site retention of the audience. This is true in the case of e-commerce websites. It is crucial for the important links to be in full view of the customer for better conversion rate. Most site visitors will bounce back to the search results from your website if they are unable to locate what they came looking for.
What You Can Do:
- Make sure that the horizontal navigation bar is on top of the page.
- Avoid drop-down menus if your website has limited sections.
- Any eCommerce website design company would say that the first and the last sections get the maximum impressions. Hence, you should keep the important information on the top and the ‘contact us’ section at the bottom.
Loading Speed
The Problem:
Everyone’s on the clock and a slow loading website is just not acceptable. Did you know that an average visitor waits for only 3 seconds for a website to load? That means your website should load in less than 2 seconds!
What You Can Do:
- You can get the speed of your website tested with Google’s Pagespeed Insights and start treating performance as a part of your web design. Remember speed is good for SEO performance.
- You can do away with excessive flash content on your website.
- Optimize heavy images and remove unnecessary plugins.
- Use the Content Delivery Network for heavy websites.
A Missing ‘Call to Action’
The Problem:
A call to action is a prompt for visitors on what the next step should be. If you have included an informational blog on your website, it is wise to consider adding a buying button within the content. As per a web designing company in Delhi, the most common CTAs are - Add to cart, Contact Us, Sign up now, and Claim offer!
What You Can Do:
- Your CTA must not be riddled with flowery words or phrases; the point must be kept clear.
- You CTA button design should look clickable.
- Attract using figures; you can make more conversion with a lot of offers, discounts, etc.
Pagination
The Problem:
It is the splitting up of content on several different pages. While this makes sense on an e-commerce website, it is being used by a lot of other news and entertainment websites too. The idea is to increase the number of page views, which boosts their viewing statistics and they charge more for ads on each page. However, there’s a drawback to this. This is bad for SEO as crawlers will find it difficult to index with little content on each page and visitors don’t like loading so many pages to read just one article.
What You Can Do:
- Pagination with Keyboard arrows allows users to move from one page to another without actually clicking the pagination.
- Make your web pages longer without compromising the speed.
- Users find it easier to scroll than to click. Hence, you can make your content more scrollable.
Conclusion
If you avoid these common web design mistakes, you can rank higher on search engine results page. Other common mistakes include missing social share buttons, making the contact form too long, and not including the search bar. A huge number of potential customers are lost due to poor website design. Hence, these must be avoided at all costs.
Published by Jack Louis