As Halloween slowly creeps in from the moonlight we start to shine our torches on some of the more terrifying aspects of website development – the macabre mistakes! Not all mistakes have to be website breaking or glaringly obvious to have an impact or your website and your sales.
In this blog, I will cover some of the less apparent mistakes that may be lurking within your website so you can navigate the labyrinth and get more treats than tricks this Halloween.
Buried alive in text
Text is always great on a website because it can help with your SEO Marketing, as they say, content is king! But too much of a good thing can be excessive and harmful. Our first mistake would be having too much text in one place. Too much text can feel overwhelming on the reader and, likely, they will just skip over the whole section and get no information from it at all.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t include a lot of text on your website because you certainly should, just be mindful of where you are putting it. An evenly separated spread throughout your website will be easier to read and look more visually appealing than an information dump one page and the others left as dead as a cemetery.
One very small mistake
Another commonly overlooked website mistake is keeping an eye on the text size. It is no wonder why this mistake is usually missed – it’s because the text is too small!
With mobile-first web design in mind, it is easy to forget about upscaling the font size to fit on desktop browsers. Smaller font size may look cleaner but it makes your website difficult to read and inaccessible for those who have difficulty seeing. This can lead to your readers missing crucial information and having a nightmarish time contacting you.
Witch spelling is which spelling?
Spelling mistakes throughout your website can make it look amateurish and unprofessional. Naturally, this is bad for business as you want to be presenting yourself as a professional to show your commitment to the business.
It is very easy to gloss over spelling mistakes when proofreading especially when it is a grammatical mistake or one that wouldn’t be picked up by a spell checker, for example, using realize instead of realise. A good tool to use, and one we use, to spellcheck your content is Grammarly.
It’s aliiiiive… or is it?
This next web design mistake may not be common but it can be fatal and easily skipped if you’re not paying attention. It is making sure your website actually goes live. We like to build our websites on WordPressand a handy feature that is part of WordPress is the ability to hide websites from search engines.
It is usually best practice to hide development sites from being crawled and indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. This is to make sure when the website goes live to make sure isn’t dragged down to the grave by the development site.
Evil scheming & cruel colours
A badly stitched together colour scheme can lead to your doom when it comes to designing your website. Horribly mismatched colours and similar shades can make your website difficult to read or lead the reader’s eye all over the place. It is always best to use complementary colours and decide on a scheme (not an evil one though!) before beginning your web design.
You can always use tools such as Adobe Colorand Coolorsto pick out an appropriate colour scheme for your website. You can also check out our blog on colour theory here.
Don’t dig your own grave this Halloween, do you want a website built with all these spooky mistakes kept dead and buried? Contact us on 01925 563 960or contact us using our contact form to see what we at Mosaic can do to grow and promote your business.
