As of 2020, there are almost 2 billion websites worldwide, with approximately 200 million of them being active. With scores of new websites being opened every day, the competition for traffic has never been stiffer.
In today’s business world, having a top-notch company website is a necessity. 87 percent of all shoppers begin their search online. You want to make sure that when your prospective shoppers head online, they can easily find you.
One way to differentiate yourself from the competition is to have a top-quality web design. Too often, businesses make mistakes with web designs that turn off would-be consumers the moment they stumble on it. Every time you lose a potential customer because of a poor website, that’s money out the door.
In today’s post, we outline 18 top web design mistakes that can dent your digital marketing strategy. Keep reading to learn more.
1. Under-Planning Your Website
When you first opened your business, you sat down and created an exhaustive business plan. You researched every stage of its operations, from inception to your target market, launching, promotion, and its ongoing growth.
This should also be the case when you’re designing your company website. Think about which components are necessary for a growing website. In particular, focus on top-notch content marketing by developing original, top-quality content that firmly establishes you as an authority in your niche.
2. Creating Too Long Pages
Too often, digital marketers demand too much concentration from their audience. Remember that the rest of the internet, with all the juicy celebrity gossip and cute videos, is only one or two short clicks away. If your pages are too long with huge amounts of text can quickly turn off visitors to your website.
So how long should your articles be? Long enough for you to deliver your message before you lose your reader’s attention. Ideally, that’s between 2,100 and 2,400 words.
Edit and proofread your text to make sure it’s well written. Display the text in chunks that are easy to read and digest by your visitors.
It’s always a good idea to break your content into subgroupings. Give the subgroupings appropriate subheadings. Ultimately, the vast majority of your visitors will only skim your different website pages, which is why subheadings and bullet points are vital.
3. Exclusively Focusing on Products and Services
Of course, the main reason you created your business website was to promote your brand and drive sales. However, this should never be the sole reason. That would make your website no different from countless others that offer the same products or services that you do.
To set yourself apart from the rest, you want to highlight what makes your brand and website unique. The best business websites inject their company’s personality into their web-based enterprise.
Why did you decide to start providing the service you do? What’s your personal or company philosophy? Such things contribute to a unique experience for visitors to your website.
4. Unclear CTAs
So, potential clients have found your business website. That’s an outstanding achievement, but the battle isn’t over yet.
Now that they’re on your website, what do you want from your visitors? It could be a lead, a subscription, or a purchase. Whichever the case, it’s up to you to nudge them towards where you want them to go.
Your website design and content may have hooked your visitors to the end, but don’t forget to add a clear progression to the next step of the interaction. That’s where a decisive call to action comes in. Make sure your CTAs are simple and straightforward to encourage your readers to take the appropriate action.
5. Using Poor Quality or Irrelevant Images
Graphics and photos are an essential part of website design. Imagery can convey complex concepts quickly without your readers having to read the text. Unfortunately, some businesses give little thought to the images they use on their websites, opting for irrelevant, low-quality images.
Keep in mind that your business website might be your first point of contact with potential customers. That’s why any photos and videos that you use on different website pages need to be crisp and useful to your content. Anything pixelated or blurry is unacceptable.
Sometimes, you may need to use original photos when illustrating a product. Hire the services of a seasoned photographer to get the best quality photos. For other images, consider utilizing free stock photos from various online databases that provide them.
Be careful when using photos from online sources. Copyrighted photos can land you in trouble with the law and make you look unprofessional.
6. Hidden Navigation
Nothing frustrates visitors to a website more than navigability issues. In an age were consumers get whatever they want to be delivered instantly, anything that forces them to wait longer will make them leave your site without a second thought.
A huge mistake many businesses make on their websites is making their navigation menu difficult to find. Can visitors locate the menu or search bar right away? If not, your site’s navigational aspects have issues, and the sooner you fix them, the better.
7. Writing for 100 Percent of Your Web Traffic
You can’t craft a copy that meets the needs of every visitor to your website. A well-written post should target a specific market. If you try to please 100 percent of all visitors to your site, your message will most likely be bland and unfocused.
Develop content for the smaller group of visitors who are most likely to convert. Such content will help you meet your intended results sooner than unfocused copies.
8. Not Prioritizing SEO
Sure, you have a great website that’s easily navigable and offers a superb browsing experience. But if you haven’t included search engine optimization (SEO) in its design, then your efforts in building a beautiful website may go to waste. Your site is likely to get lost in the thick forest of the internet.
That’s why you should always factor SEO in your website design from the very start. SEO boosts your discoverability by helping your business website rank highly on search engines. Good SEO is built into the very design of your website and serves and the foundation of a site, not the roof.
9. Overlooking Your Website’s Blog
Your company’s blog is central to the overall success of your digital marketing campaign. A blog acts as the ideal space to personalize your business website. It allows you to personalize your website and differentiate it from the rest.
Use your blog to add interesting and fresh content that keeps your visitors engaged. Schedule regular updates for the blog and well-written and relevant content.
What if you don’t feel capable of producing a top-notch blog?
Well, this is one area you can outsource to a professional writer or product information management expert. A professional will create engaging content that has appropriate headlines and titles. They’ll also be able to optimize that content for SEO, helping you rank highly on search engines without sounding too promotional.
10. Putting Ads in the Wrong Places
Regardless of the type of business you run, chances are you’ll need to include advertisements in your web content, especially on blog posts. But having excessive, flashy, or noisy ads can frustrate readers and have the opposite effect to what you intended.
Examine your ads keenly. Does any of them annoy you? If so, then it will have the same effect on your potential clients.
Analyze your pop-ups in particular. Make sure they’re not full-screen size and are easy to close.
11. Underestimating Mobile Traffic
With US smartphone users spending an average of 3 hours and 30 minutes on the internet every day, the importance of having a mobile-friendly website cannot be overemphasized. No doubt that a large percentage of people who browse on the internet are looking for a product or a service, so it’s essential that your website is prepared to receive them.
If your website isn’t already configured mobile-responsive, find a seasoned website designer to configure it to load and display quickly on different screen sizes.
12. Using Too Long Videos
The place of video in today’s digital marketing world is unquestionable. The majority of American businesses already have a presence on YouTube. Top-quality videos can enhance your company website.
However, when your videos are too long, they can be redundant, regardless of how well you’ve made them. Remember, the purpose of videos is to engage your visitors, not to try their patience.
Videos that are too long can be broken into shorter, episodic videos and arranged logically. Other videos should only last a minute or so unless they’re instructional videos, in which case they should only be a few minutes long.
13. Ignoring the Importance of Speed
Earlier, we pointed out that web users value quick delivery. If your web pages take more than five seconds to load, there’s a high likelihood that they will abandon your site. Even worse, these users may turn to your competitor’s site.
Of course, there are factors that you can’t control, such as the device that a user is using to access your page or how fast their internet connection is.
However, you still need to do your best to enable users to access the content they’re looking for quickly. One to do so is to declutter your site and avoid too long videos or large imagery.
14. Forgetting to Include Contact Details
This may sound strange, but you’ll be surprised by the number of businesses that fail to include their contact information on their business website. If a visitor decides to use your services or purchase a product, it’s vital that they get your contact details if they need them. Imagine what will happen if they can’t find them.
That’s why you need to have a “Contact Us” page on your website. Even better, make sure that this page is just a click away.
15. Keyword Stuffing
Conducting keyword research is an essential part of SEO. Using keywords that you rank for can help enhance your discoverability on Google and other search engines.
However, it can be tempting to over-optimize keyword use. Stuffing your copy with keywords to achieve higher page rankings can and will backfire on you.
Google’s algorithm is extremely good at spotting pages that have extraneous keywords in their content. Once you get caught, it could affect your rankings or even lead to Google removing your page from its search results.
16. Including Unnatural Links
One way to enhance the ranking of your web pages is to include top-quality inbound links. Some businesses, however, indulge in unscrupulous tactics to get links. One of them involves buying links.
One of the things about bought links is that they may not have the quality required to boost your ranking. In fact, these links can prove detrimental to your website. Google looks at such links and unnatural and treats them the same way it deals with keyword stuffing.
Rather than use unnatural links, focus on Google-friendly ways of building links. For instance, you can try guest blogging.
17. Ignoring Google Analytics
While web owners don’t have to pay to use Google Analytics, not many businesses take advantage of this tool. Google Analytics can be a great help when it comes to gauging how your website is performing and where you need to focus more efforts on. Even if you’ve never used the tool before, there’s plenty of useful information online to guide you.
18. Not Promoting Your Website on Social Media
The era of social media is here, and there’s no better way to take advantage of this powerful platform than to promote your business. First of all, your company needs to be present on all major social media networks. Ensure that your company’s social media pages link to your website so you can attract more traffic.
Now You Know Which Mistakes With Web Designs to Avoid
A successful business website can help propel your business to the next level within no time. To build such a website, it is essential that you veer away from common mistakes with web designs that your competitors may be making.
Would you like to learn more about how to enhance your company website? Please keep visiting our blog.
