The face of your business online is your website and as such it must have design and functionality to match. Common web design mistakes can leave your website inaccessible or deliver the wrong message.
When getting ready to create a website, you will want to be aware of several web design mistakes that may impact the entire process. Avoiding these common confusion is an important step in ensuring that your site stays user-friendly, and looking good on all devices.
Below is a list of “don’ts” that every website owner should read:
Too hard to read your site content
You spend hours writing quality content for your site, but then put in effort to making it hard to read..
A couple of factors to remember are; Ensure the contrast between text colour and the background colour are a match; Avoid setting your font size too small that people have to zoom to read; Split larger content into multiple pages or risk users getting distracted.
Remember these and make sure you have neat, legible content that won’t hurt your visitors eyes and brain!
Snow Jacket with Board Shorts?
Don’t let your website suffer from a split-personality. Make sure you have a comprehensive message and style.
Mixing and matching your web site design is often the wrong way to go! Define your presence; Define your online branding; Be creative with your design, stand out from the crowd but make sure you are consistent!
Captain Cook found Australia easier!
You have 3 different menus on one page, buttons that don’t make sense, menu hides itself and can’t find the thingy to click to get it back. Avoid sloppy navigation!
When Cook landed on the east coast, he could clearly see to the North or South by water…. keep your navigation simple and intuitive. Visitors that can not find their way around a website will go back to a website they can.
Did Mr Magoo take that photo?
If the photo and images on your website are pixelated that it feels like you travelled back to Googles first birthday; Images are cropped at points the message is cut out; When your image of an orange, on your banana website looks out of place, we have issues.
Images paint a picture for your web site. Therefore painting a clear picture for your visitors helps avoid confusion and provides clarity to your message. Make sure they are the right size, cropped correctly, high quality and optimised for speed.
I have 4 cupboards for my cutlery…
Do you hoard? Do you know a hoarder? Picture it… imagine if your website was like that!
Cluttering content into your website makes it near impossible for visitors to find what they are looking for, and even harder for you to show them the parts you want them to see! Having content is great when displayed in a way that areas are separated, separated by whitespace! Whitespace is exactly that, it is an area, or areas, of your site designed to train the visitors eyes to “shop button” or “contact us” or the money making action your web site exists for.
Whoa, you can view websites on a mobile phone?
Remember when the Nokia snakes game and massive battery life was the major function of phones, you know when websites had pixelated images.
Mobile devices account for over the half the global web usage. Sure, your regular site loads on a phone but people don’t want to pinch and zoom and scroll left and right along with up and down. There really is no excuse for having a website in 2016 that is not responsive or mobile friendly!
Being assertive with your requirements for your website is a must. Missing any of these common web design mistakes above may not only cause your conversions to drop, but Google love will drop with it. Google takes into account over 200 factors when determining where to put your site in the search results, if at all! Making it user friendly and making it with your visitors in mind will tick more Google boxes than you think!