Guest blog post by the folks at 3magine Web Design.

Your website is one of the most important features of your business. Whether you are using it to collect leads, build awareness of your brand or sell your products, you need a solid website. Unfortunately, small businesses have limited resources and that can mean their website design suffers. 

Here are 5 of the most common website design mistakes and how to avoid them... 






Mistake #1: The site isn't responsive

The web isn’t just accessed by consumers through their computers anymore. More consumers access the Internet via their mobile devices, such as tablets or smart phones, than they do via their desktops. Your website needs to have responsive design in order to allow it to be mobile-friendly. What happens if your website doesn’t have responsive design? Usually, your webpages won’t fill up the screen on the device they are being visited on. For example, your website may show up perfectly on a desktop. However, if you try to visit it on a smart phone, you’ll probably have to scroll left and right in addition to up and down in order to view the whole page. This is horribly inconvenient for consumers trying to access your website on their mobile devices, and you'll lose lots of leads. 

When you're designing your site, don't design several different websites to meet the needs of every type of device. Instead, create a responsive design which allows your website to be properly displayed in the highest resolution on any device consumers may be using. Before you build your website, check with the service you're using or talk with your designer. If they aren't well-versed in responsive design and able to execute a responsive site, go elsewhere. 


Mistake #2: The site doesn't include social proof

If you expect to capture leads via your website, then you’ll need to provide social proof. It doesn’t matter how good your content is or how professional your website looks if you don’t have social proof. Consumers are wary about providing websites with personal information or making purchases online. They instinctively won’t trust you, especially if you aren’t a nationally known company. 

If you provide social proof, they’ll be much more at ease. Consider adding customer reviews and ratings, social media share and like numbers, customer testimonials and PR or media mentions. 

Mistake #3: The site isn't user friendly

While responsive design is an important part of making a user-friendly website experience, there are numerous other factors that play a part as well. For example, your website needs to be easy to navigate. This should be basic web design for beginners. When someone visits your page, it should be easy for them to find what they are looking for, whether it’s your contact page, your blog page, your e-commerce page or your company bio page, to name a few. If links to these pages are difficult to find, visitors are going to become frustrated. 

Make sure links to important inner pages are in clear sight near the top of your homepage. Users should be able to flow easily through your site and find what they came there for. Your web pages should also load quickly - there’s nothing more annoying than having to wait an eternity for a page to load. In fact, most visitors will hit the back button if the page takes more than three or four seconds to load, which means you could be losing sales or leads. If this isn't the case, you need to retool your site. 

Mistake #4: The layout of the site isn't aesthetically pleasing 

Guess what? Looks do matter when it comes to website design. The way your homepage looks is the first impression that visitors will have of your company. So if it doesn’t look professional, it’s going to reflect badly on you. 

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to go crazy with the fonts and the colors they use. You shouldn’t use more than two fonts - one for your headers and one for your body text. Always use a dark text color on a bright background color - never vice versa. Our eyes are used to reading black on white, which means it’s going to strain your visitors’ eyes if you use something like white text on a black background. 

Mistake #5: The site wasn't properly and thoroughly tested before launch

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is neglecting to test out your website. You might have a beautiful site, but if all the kinks and bugs aren't figured out, you will frustrate visitors. You might hear about it from these potential customers, but more than likely they will simply leave your site and never visit it again. 

You should test out the responsive design of the site to make sure it works on every browser, computer, smartphone and tablet. The last thing you want is for a potential customer to click on a broken link or to visit a page that won’t load. Make sure a crew of testers use the site a lot and flag any weak points. If your code is sloppy and your website doesn't work like it's supposed to, what kind of trust will visitors have in your services or products?




Were any web design mistakes left out of this article? Tweet us your pet peeves.