In web designing, there are various factors, elements, and design choices that could make it much tougher for the user to navigate, connect, and have more confidence.
Just redesigning the website isn’t enough. You need to understand in what departments, and in which all parts of your website betterment are needed, and how much.
One can easily make mistakes, and the big tragedy is that sometimes you do well with the intricacies, but in the process, you oversee some basics. This can hinder your success, and with a bit of effort, you can avoid such tragedy.
By tragedy, we mean spending money, investing time, and still not reaping the expected advantage from your website.
Read about six website design mistakes – and how to avoid them – if you do not want to lose your target audience.
1. Cluttering your website
You run the risk of one of the most common website design errors without a solid basis: adding excess elements just because they are available.
Before you start, it’s always worth reading about basic design principles. It is important to start with an idea of what you want to achieve on your website and how that will happen. Today’s web design software offers a wide range of tools and options for amateur designers (pop-ups, animated logos, and embedded video).
Don’t be swept up in busy designs that overload users with unwanted pop-up commercials, autoplay videos (plural), and a hectic navigation bar.
Fortunately, preventing overcrowding is relatively as easy as avoiding the temptation to add additional elements to your website “to see what happens.” It should not be there unless you can explain what a specific element is meant to do on your site. So keep focused on building a strong, straightforward structure to provide users with the most positive, efficient experience.
2. Jumping straight onto the computer
The second common web design error takes us to the core of the design process. Most companies (and a fair number of amateur web designers) still think of web design as an “on the computer” process.
While it is true that this is the way you will see your eventual creation, nothing else could be further from the truth in designing it. If you start designing your website before using a Web Design Program or Builder, you would prefer to use more traditional artistic methods.
In particular, a pencil and a piece of paper are the best way to start designing a website. First of all, write a list of your website’s objectives and then construct a series of pages to achieve this key objective.
This way, you can detect any clear redundancies in your design and will make your site much easier.
This type of approach is one reason why the best web designers can actually charge their customers apparently high fees. This isn’t because they know how to use software for building websites, but because they know how to structure your site properly and because they can help you to make sure your vision works long before either person touches a computer.
3. Have a plan
Now that you understand that some basic improvements are likely required on your website, it’s time to reverse and build a plan to explain how you are going to address them. Start by mapping your customer travel from your first visit to your website until you become a customer.
Think about which pages you will read, what content you will read and what offers you will be able to convert. This helps you design a site that really helps to nurture the sales funnel.
We have always liked the customer travel map of Leadfeeder as a good example. You don’t have to make it graphic, but it passes the point. It shows what users do on their website and what commonalities exist between those who are and are not clients.
4. Overlooking guidelines, grids, and columns
You will begin building templates for your pages, the next step in building your Website. Even the most basic Website designers are provided with grids, guidelines, and columns tools. When it comes to page design, many younger web designers are overlooking these tools and believe it is only appropriate for “blockier” older websites.
In reality, grids are the core structural element for each web page, which should be utilized to manage the visual elements of an entire page. Guidelines and grids formed the basis for the core graphic design skills long prior to the introduction of web design and will surely be a fundamental instrument for the coming years.
Regardless of whether your web page shows the line for your grids and columns, they still form the basis of the framework and the proportions between the elements underlying your Website. Grids help divide web pages both horizontally and vertically, thereby determining the alignment of various design elements.
That said, grid-based design and more modern design and consumer research techniques can also be combined. The wide range of ways consumers interact with the web has created similar expectations of how they expect unique types of web pages to feel and look.
5. Lack of visual hierarchy
Our list contains a slightly more complex fourth Website design error, at least for website design. One of the most frequent mistakes on new websites is that the importance of visual hierarchy is overlooked.
In accordance with their importance, visual hierarchy is defined by its orderly arrangement. This means that if you do not get this right, the various features of your designs, all of them fighting to get their attention, could bombard users. They are not effectively guided to your CTA, which means that no conversions are carried out.
Think carefully about what your visitors come to your site to create a strong visual hierarchy. Conduct UX investigation and ensure intuitive and seamless user flow.
E-commerce sites provide a good example of this. The best rely mostly on the user experience for their personal branding. Rather, they serve as a portal for customers to learn about the products tailored to them and to buy them.
Typically, well-designed eCommerce sites only remind the user of the website they are at (very important): just after the smooth, seamless, and easy shopping process for a particular item has been finished.
6. Overlooking accessibility
The Web and the Internet are an ever-increasing resource in many aspects of our lives, including education, jobs, government, business, healthcare, leisure, etc. In order to give equal access and equal opportunity to persons with disabilities, it is essential that the web is accessible to everyone. An accessible web can contribute to the more active participation of people with disabilities in society.
Even an accessible website is often the easiest way to do business with many people with disabilities, e.g., people who are unable to read print material, people who are struggling to go to a shop or mall, and others. Furthermore, you overlap with other best practices, such as mobile web design, usability, and optimisation of search engines for accessibility (SEO)
For many people with disabilities, an accessible website provides access to information and interaction. In other words, web technologies are much easier to remove accessibility barriers to printing, audio, and visual media.
Accessibility is a very important part of web design and can seriously affect the results your website achieves by overlooking it. In the previous few years, many businesses have recognized the importance of providing visitors with a wide range of disabilities and abilities with their websites.
Of course, there is a moral argument in favor of making your site usable by the widest possible number of people, but it also has a business case. After all, broadening your audience can only increase your chances of successful sales.
Even if you are currently not legally required to make your site accessible, industry standards will probably require this in the short term. Trying to use and retroactively add a website that has not been designed for accessibility often represents a costly and time-consuming effort.
Then, before you begin to think about how your web designs use text, imagery, and sound, add alt tags to images, include sound descriptions, and maintain space and readable copy in a non-serif font. If you have videos, let users choose to press play instead of leaving them in an auto setting and search for your user experience.
Developing accessibility to your mind creates more innovative, creative, and smart websites. You can experience trends freely, but you can guarantee that they are implemented in your design. No good design should impede exposure, and it is exactly what you do if your website is not accessible to some.
7. Not designing for mobile
The last design error on our website is that which is still done by the majority of companies that are looking for a website for the first time. Just as web design remains considered as something “on the computer,” many still consider mobile browsing as an “alternative” to a website’s “main experience” – the desktop site. Simply, that’s no longer the case. Indeed, mobile browsing accounts now for most Internet traffic and, before they make the desktop site, many web designers would actually make a mobile site.
This is called a “mobile-first” strategy and is now popular with even large companies. Designing the first desktop can be a mistake because you risk overwhelming or slowing down your website to avoid making it user-friendly on mobile devices. Instead, first design and then extend your website to a desktop version of the site.
The reasons for designing your website mobile are sufficiently clear. According to Alexander Williams of Hosting Data, a London-based web developer, conversions should be your principal aim in creating a website, and they must also be able to buy products directly on their mobile in a world where the majority of visitors are using a smartphone.
Of course, the same can also be applied in tablets, smart devices, and nearly all other Internet-enabled hardware that is currently available. In other words, your web design must be accessible on different devices and responsive enough to automatically adjust to the fullest possible spectrum of devices. This can be difficult, as we have pointed out elsewhere, for it requires attention to a wide spectrum of factors, from the design of your pages to the size of the images you use.
If in doubt…
…hire an expert. The mistakes we have listed appear to be simple enough, but if you are new to the web design process, they are very easy to make. Even large companies sometimes go wrong, but working with a designer means you have the best opportunity for your brand.
We at AccuWebTech, have been in the line of designing SEO-friendly and conversion booster websites for pretty long, and we keep just a small profit margin. Your website redesign will cost you much less than developing it from scratch (most web developer companies do that in order to increase your expense).
So, don’t hesitate to discuss with us. Contact us HERE.
Leave a Reply