When it comes to website design, a common goal to have in mind is to be creative as you like and make a website that is unique and promotes your business. Usually, a distinctive website design is a great goal to have as it encourages you to go against the grain and design an exclusive website. This, however, does not always go to plan, as there is a reason why websites are designed the way they are.
When designing websites there are some unwritten rules, and some written ones, to what makes a website effective that web designers adhere. In this blog, I will be covering some of the most common mistakes and pitfalls people fall into when trying to design their own distinctive website.
If you are looking to get your website built by a professional agency please contact us or give us a call on 01925 563 960 and discuss how we can help you.
Not Enough Content
One of the most common traps people fall into when designing their website is the lack of good content, or sometimes any content, on their website. Websites require a good amount of content be it images or text in order to be found and picked up by search engines. Search engines look at the content on your website and rank it accordingly to how relevant it thinks your website is to the search term. If your website is lacking in content then it is less likely to come up in search results meaning less people will see it. This, of course, is bad for business.
Too Much Content
On the contrary, to the above point, having too much content on your website can also be detrimental to your website design. When we say too much content what we really mean is too much irrelevant content or too much content clustering together in one location rather than it being distributing it evenly throughout your website. Content is great for SEO for when a search engine crawls your site as it is more likely to find lots of relevant content to the search results that you’re likely aiming for however when the user goes onto your website they may feel overwhelmed by the clutter of irrelevant and lengthy content and bounce back off the website.
No Call to Actions
A lot of website design is about getting your audience to the contact us page, buying a product or in other ways subscribing to the service you are advertising. This is sometimes lost in translation when building a website as they focus to much on how the website looks and not enough on how the website works. The main element that is essential to websites that many amateur designers miss is the need for effective calls to action. A call to action is a link or an instruction to the user that tells them to do an immediate action, usually being a prompt to completing sale or gaining them as a client. These are more often than not either never implemented or poorly executed in a way that the user doesn’t feel compelled to click or doesn’t even realise that they should click in some cases. Bad call to actions will reduce the conversion rates on your website making your website design effectively useless.
Bad Images
More often than not when we are doing website design, we encounter a vast amount of bad imagery. A good image wants to be high-quality, relevant and well optimised but many of time that images we come across tend to be the opposite of this criteria; pixelated, irrelevant and otherwise too large. All these traits of a good image are vital for a website design as these are what draws the users attention the most and is what keeps the user from bouncing right back off the website. Traps that I have encountered amateur website designers fall into is using images that do not fit the area that they are using them. Examples of these could be a small image used as a banner image forcing it to expand and be highly pixelated or alternatively a very large sized image in a small area that would take longer to load than necessary.
Not Mobile Responsive
The last and perhaps most vital of these website design mistakes that people fall into is forgetting or just neglecting the need for a mobile responsive website. As we move into the future, more and more people are moving to mobile web surfing. According to various studies over 50% of all website traffic is now coming from mobiles and that number is only increasing. If that isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of making your website mobile responsive, Google is now starting to rank your website down if it deems it as not mobile friendly. This means you will not only be losing traffic from anybody browsing on mobile but you will also be penalised for it. It is not just mobile responsiveness you want to worry about either, making sure that your website design is fully responsive is just as important. This means making sure your website works on not just mobiles, tablets and full-width but also on any dimensions the user may have their browser width set at.
Making your website distinctive whilst adhering to the above criteria can be difficult, if you are struggling to make an effective website or looking to get your website built by a professional agency please contact us or give us a call on 01925 563 960 and discuss how we can help you.
