Good web design is essential to providing a positive experience for your site visitors. Good web design means keeping visitors on your site longer, increasing your returning visitors, and ultimately increasing your conversion rate if your site is successfully getting your customers where they need to go to purchase your products or services. Due to a decreasing emphasis on traditional SEO techniques, web design is also becoming increasingly important to your SEO efforts. Here are 10 of the most common and most harmful mistakes that designers make as documented by our San Diego web design firm. Avoid these mistakes and you’ll be several steps ahead of many of your competitors.
1. Broken Links
Few things are worse than having a broken link on your site, which can produce a dreaded 404 error or a variety of other undesirable results. It makes your site look unprofessional, and can even hurt your search rankings. Test your site regularly to make sure all of your links are working like they should.
2. Slow Load Times
A slow-loading site is a good way to send your visitors to competitors. Make sure your website is loading quickly, and if it is not, see about trimming back all of those fancy images and animations you have going. If that doesn’t work, contact your host as soon as you can.
3. Multiple Windows
If all of your links open into new windows, your visitors’ desktops are going to get pretty crowded, and this can be annoying. Pop-up windows are usually a bad idea too. This is an age of tabbed browsing, so have your links open into new tabs, or better yet, let your visitors do it themselves. Our San Diego web design team has found that having solid navigation features helps too, which we’ll discuss below.
4. Bad Organization and Navigation
Bad site organization is a killer: dead ends and vague navigation options can leave your visitors lost, confused, and frustrated. Your site should be easy to navigate and customers should be able to find what they need quickly and easily. This means having both a well-organized site, and a useful navigation bar that is present wherever the visitor goes, so they can return to a previous page with ease, or navigate to a page that they want.
5. Hard-to-Find Contact Info
Another way to frustrate visitors is by making your contact information elusive or non-existent. Make sure you have information like an email address, phone number, or physical address on every page.
6. No Links to Social Media
Visitors should be able to jump back and forth from your website to your social media pages. Otherwise you are missing out on potential customer interaction, and you’re probably frustrating users that want to jump to your social media pages too. Our San Diego web design firm makes social media integration a priority on client websites; it boosts your search engine rankings too.
7. No Back Button
Some site designers opt to disable users’ back buttons so they can’t easily navigate away from the website. This is a bad idea and will just drive away visitors, even if they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. No one likes to be manipulated into doing things.
8. Overly Busy Design
Some beginners in web design can get a little overexcited and overdo it on the fonts and colors, which can drive away visitors. You want your site to look graphically appealing, and even have a little artistic flourish if done well, but you don’t want there to be too much going on, either. A consistent theme with clear, easy-to-read pages is much more effective. Our San Diego web design team has found the best results with clean, brand-themed, functional web designs.
9. No Link to Home
None of your pages should have dead ends, which can pose a problem for visitors looking to navigate back to the homepage, or stop visitors from entering the site if a certain page is shared with them or linked to. Make sure all of your pages have links back to your homepage, or even a good navigation bar as mentioned above.
10. Bad or Dated Info
Nothing puts off a potential customer like error-ridden or outdated information. Scan your web pages carefully and make sure your content is up to date and correct. Besides, keeping your site up to date and fresh with quality content helps your search ranking.
Need a Professional?
If you’d like a professional San Diego web design firm to design the ultimate site for your business, Coalition Technologies can help. Give us a call today at 1-310-827-3890 to receive a free quote.