Posted on Jun 28, 2018

4 Website Design Mistakes You Should Avoid—No Matter What

Before you start building a new business website, you have to choose a website design. It’s important to understand what is influencing that design decision.

For most business owners, it’s their eye. They browse templates and, based on their personal opinion of each design, they pick the one they like.

Despite how common it is, this uninformed decision-making process can produce unintended results. Specifically, the website design templates and themes we choose based on sight alone could contain critical design mistakes. Some of these will not only contribute to a lackluster user experience; they’ll also negatively impact your website’s search engine optimization efforts.

Get the most of your new website design. Avoid these four terrible website design mistakes at all costs.

1. The Site Isn’t Mobile-Friendly.

Most of your site visitors will be coming to your website via their smartphones. If your website design is antiquated, it won’t immediately adapt to mobile devices. Your audience will have to zoom in and out and scroll around using their fingers. After a few seconds, this laborious experience will frustrate your users and they’ll leave.

Not only will you lose prospective customers, you will get dinged by Google’s search algorithm, which heavily prioritizes mobile-friendly websites over unresponsive sites.

It’s critical to pick out a responsive, mobile-friendly design template and to troubleshoot how that template looks on smartphones and tablets.

Before you launch, run your website through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and PageSpeed Insights. The former will let you know how to further optimize your site for mobile users and subsequently improve your SEO. The latter will give you information about how quickly pages load and which improvements you need to make to improve that loading speed.

2. The Design Is Too Busy.

There are three basic design elements to consider when choosing a new website template. First, you’ll have to decide which Content Width Design you want to use: full-width or boxed-width.

Full-width gives the appearance that your website doesn’t have boundaries. The background image stretches across the entire width of the page. This kind of Content Width Design is great for modern, innovative website designs. You can fit more labels across your navigation menu and, arguably the biggest benefit, your site is more responsive and mobile-friendly.

Boxed-width frames your website, putting subtle margins around the content. While it’s not as responsive as a full-width design, boxed-width does look highly professional and appears consistent across all platforms.

The next design decision you have to make is regarding the header. Typically, there are four choices for your header design: static header image with no content, static header image with content, slideshow header with content, and video background header.

Static header image without content is best for sites that use large, dramatic photographs. This header style absorbs a huge amount of above-the-fold space. It’s ideal for design companies, photographers, videographers, and other creative industries.

Static header image with content is great for most types of businesses and personal websites. It lets you fit in a headline, introductory paragraph, graphics, and a call-to-action above the fold of your website.

Slideshow header with content lets you display a wide variety of products and services to different audiences. It’s ideal for e-commerce sites and other retail-driven stores.

If you have the budget, video background headers are highly impactful. They open as soon as visitors reach your site and communicate unique, branded content. It’s important for the video to have high-quality production.

Finally, you’ll need to choose where you’ll place the navigation menu.

Some templates put the menu bar in a fixed position at the top of the website. This is a great choice for websites that publish regular content because it allows visitors to switch pages without losing their place on each page.

Most templates use a top horizontal menu bar. This design element is popular because it optimizes the visitor’s ability to scroll and streamlines navigation.

3. The Content Isn’t Broken Up With Headers, Subheaders, and Small Paragraphs.

Your content could be extraordinarily interesting. It doesn’t matter. If it’s structured in long, extraneous paragraphs and devoid of headlines, your site visitors won’t be able to digest it. They’ll scroll down and close the window to your website.

Help them out. Break up your website content. Add bold, succinct headers to each page and write short introductory paragraphs (shoot for three or four sentences). Then create a subheader under which you’ll place a section of text that’s four paragraphs long at the most.

In each page, try to use at least three subheaders, including an obvious call-to-action. Keep each paragraph to three lines for optimal mobile scanning.

If listing products, services, or other items, use bullets. Embed infographics, charts, and photographs to add a multimedia element to the content.

4. The Website Doesn’t Have a Dedicated Contact Page.

The ultimate goal of every website, regardless of whether it’s conversion or traffic-focused, is to connect with an audience. Therefore, it’s absolutely necessary to provide some kind of contact information on your website.

Ideally, your contact information should be ever-present, such as on the footer of the template. If you do include your business’ phone number and email, be sure to make both of them clickable for smartphones.

In addition to putting your contact information on the footer, create a separate Contact page. Include a message platform with a Captcha and funnel those messages into your business email address.

Lastly, double-check that your Contact page is on your website’s navigation menu. You want your audience to easily reach you. Making the Contact page visible for mobile and desktop visitors will facilitate that connection. Informed, motivated customers want to skip the rest of your site and go straight to the Contact page from your Home page.

Find a Simple, User-Friendly Website Design Template

Don’t waste your time putting together a deeply flawed business website. Talk to the design experts at iPage about choosing an appropriate, mobile-friendly website template for your site. We offer hundreds of templates and themes as part of our web hosting plans. Explore our selection and check out our mobile optimized site builder, content management systems, and easy-to-use setup wizards.

When you get started, remember to avoid these common and potentially catastrophic website design mistakes.

 

 

Photo by Tranmautritam from Pexels

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