A website is a must for businesses of all sizes these days. Even if you have a great digital marketing campaign, you need a great website to help with your messaging. When a design has a 75% influence on a website’s credibility, you can’t afford to cut corners on your web design.
Even though you can get a small business website up quickly these days, that doesn’t mean you should do the bare minimum. Keep reading to learn eight website mistakes you must avoid when designing your website.
1. Too Much Noise
It’s not uncommon for people inexperienced with web design to try and cram as much information as possible on a page. It makes sense if you think about it from an information standpoint. You want people to learn as much as possible, so you include everything you can on every page.
However, this distracts people from the information they want to read. Too much information creates clutter and a poor user experience. Keep your pages simple and design things so people can focus on only the content they came to a page to consume.
2. Putting Important Information Below the Fold
One common web design trend people notice is adding huge featured images above the fold to get attention. This may not be a big deal on your home page, but that isn’t the case for other important pages on your site.
It’s hard for someone to see what your website offers if they have to scroll to see the information on your site. You have a limited amount of time to convince someone to stay, so you’ll lose many visitors if they don’t immediately find value in your website.
Keep your website’s important information above the fold to help people figure out what your web pages have to offer.
3. No Call-to-Action
A call-to-action is vital for getting visitors to take some kind of action. People need direction after consuming content. If you leave them to figure out what to do themselves, the chances are good they’ll leave or not proceed further into your sales funnel.
Your web page call-to-action provides the nudge people need. A call-to-action can be anything from signing up to an email list or giving your company a call. Your content should focus on building trust with your visitor until they’re willing to take action and follow the next steps you lay out on your website.
4. Ignoring Mobile Users
Mobile internet use is at an all-time high. Almost everyone has a smartphone now and uses them to browse the internet. That means many of your visitors will likely use devices that don’t have large screens.
Those people won’t have a great experience if you only design your website for large monitors. Your page will stretch and force people to scroll back and forth to read all your content.
Invest in a responsive website design to avoid this problem. This design will modify your website layout based on your visitors’ screen sizes.
5. Not Designing for SEO
SEO has more to it than great content. Google needs to understand your website, and it’s hard to do that if you have a poor website structure that doesn’t highlight your website’s main points.
Take SEO for home pages, for instance. Your goal should be to highlight your brand and discuss what your business does. However, pages that target keywords need to be structured in a way that highlights talking points and optimizes for rich text snippets to show up on Google
6. Having a Slow Website
A speedy website is critical for small businesses. People don’t want to wait forever for a web page to load. Your visitors have other things to do, so they’ll hit the back button and go to a competitor if your website doesn’t load quickly.
One common cause of slow websites is images. Great imagery works great at getting attention, but it can kill your page speed if you don’t optimize things. Work on reducing your image size to ensure you have a speedy site.
7. Poor Navigation
Ideally, your visitors will stick around on your website and visit more than one page. People will find what you have to offer valuable, so they’ll continue exploring to see what else you have to offer. But that’s hard to do when your website doesn’t have good navigation.
People should be able to find every page on your website with a few clicks. Focus on creating clear navigation menus and website categories that make every part of your website easy to access. You’re likely to lose customers if people can’t quickly find the pages they’re looking for.
8. Too Many Colors
Branding is critical for a website. You want people to have a consistent experience on your pages. Unfortunately, that experience will get ruined if you have too many colors that don’t align with your brand.
Most websites stick to at most two primary colors. These are the colors that you want people to associate with your brand. There may be a few extra colors here and there, but they will never detract from your main design. Avoid adding too many colors to your design to maintain a consistent experience on your website.
Avoid the Common Small Business Website Mistakes
Your website is one of the most important parts of creating an online presence, so you can’t afford to do things incorrectly. The good news is that many known small business website mistakes are easy to avoid. Keep the guide above in mind to improve your website and avoid providing a poor experience to your visitors.
Are you interested in learning more tips that will help you make the most of your business website? Head back to the blog to find more website tips that will help.
