ou can’t get away with a poorly designed website anymore. Even small businesses are discovering the powerful effects of a website on their marketing campaign. Your website shouldn’t just be polished but evoke trust and credibility while persuading people to visit your store, buy your product, or subscribe to your service. Here are some of the common web design errors every business should avoid.
With multiple devices on hand, people aren’t going to visit only your desktop site. They may learn about your website from a friend or find it in the search results and open it on their phone or tablet. If your website isn’t optimized for those platforms, it will deliver a very poor user experience and drive potential customers away.
That’s why you need to develop from the get-go with a responsive design where the elements are rearranged and the website is modified to fit into different screen resolutions and orientations. This makes your website mobile-friendly and helps you maintain a low bounce rate.
A non-responsive design isn’t the only thing that hampers accessibility. You need to make sure that users using any device or browser should be able to access your website and all of its features. Your site should maintain consistency on all browsers. For instance, it should appear identical whether you are opening it on Safari or Google Chrome.
On the other hand, if you have a business that ships products across the country or beyond the borders, make sure to provide language variations of your website. For instance, if you get a lot of orders from Montreal or Los Angeles, make sure that your website is accessible to French and Spanish speakers.
Brand credibility is everything for businesses and maintaining it is especially tough online. If you are a new business, you need to work from the ground up to establish trust and credibility with your customers. Your website is a crucial element for building trustworthiness with your potential customers and poor design can erode that effort and drive them to your competitors.
Make sure that your site has an “About Us” page with the story of your brand and detailed contact information including a physical address and a phone number where they can reach out to you immediately. Get an SSL certificate so that users don’t get a pop warning that suggests your website isn’t safe. Your site should also be quick and shouldn’t have annoying pop-ups and excessive graphics that are usually common on spammy and low-trust websites.
Have you ever tried to read a blog and a video starts automatically playing? If you’re really keen on reading the blog, you must scroll through the page and click on the video to stop it. Otherwise, you would simply go back to the search results page. That’s why you need to optimize the multimedia on your webpage for a smooth user experience. Make sure that videos on webpages require some user interaction and use highly efficient image formats that allow you to use high-resolution images that are low in size.
Most of these common mistakes are easy to avoid. However, most businesses miss them since they don’t have any web development experience. You can also hire a web developer or a digital marketing agency to help you create and optimize a polished site for your business.
Mr. Robert Willson is one of the few geeks who never gets tired when it comes to technology. From the latest gadgets to AI and machine learning, Mr. Willson translates them into easy-to-digest insights. Where there is tech, there is him!
