Obviously, the ultimate web design mistake a business owner can make when it comes to his or her website is not having one at all. However, design aspects and layouts greatly influence the experience a user has on your site.
Web design is very important to the modern consumer. In order to capture the attention of a visitor to your website, your design and the overall flow of your website needs to be on point.
Unfortunately, many business owners do not know their way around a website. Therefore, it makes sense, in most cases, to outsource your web design needs to a full-service agency like WAY Nation Solutions. Nevertheless, there are some common web design mistakes that we see when we first come across the websites of our prospective clients.
I ask that you take a look at this list and think, truthfully, to yourself about how you may surpass these common pitfalls and optimize your website for conversions. After all, your website is your online storefront. You should take pride in it.
Here are 4 common web design mistakes that small business owner makes:
1. You are choosing the wrong fonts and colors.
The font of your website copy should be professional. However, you do not want it to be boring. While you can deviate from the traditional Times New Roman or Arial fonts, you do not want to use a font that cannot be easily scanned by a reader.
Therefore, you should stay clear of curvy or cursive fonts.
As for your font colors, some colors are harder to read than others. White, black, and grey fonts are timeless for a reason. They are readable as long as the copy is in a font color that has a sharp contrast to its background color. With that being said, colored bright colored backgrounds should have an opacity overlay that makes them look transparent, making them softer on the eyes of your website’s visitors.
Pro Tip: Make sure that your fonts and colors are consistent. Although you may feel that the differences between shades of a color do not matter, the human eye sees patterns and picks up on inconsistencies. In addition, you want your brand to be unified in its design, communications, and practices.
2. You do not have any calls-to-action.
Do you know what’s nearly as bad as not having a website? Not having any calls-to-action on your website. If you don’t give your website’s visitors the avenues to take the next steps, then why have them on your website in the first place?
Place calls-to-action on your website that sparks the curiosity of your website’s visitors, influencing them to act.
Or even better, add a Managed Live Chat widget to connect with your website visitors 24/7/365.
Nevertheless, the main goal of a call-to-action is to incentivize a visitor to your website to carry out some action. Without them, your site serves ZERO conversion value to your business.
3. Your layout is clunky and outdated.
The new standard for web design is an open layout that is inviting and in no way clunky. If your website looks like it was built 10 years ago then odds are that you need an update. However, the capability of your website’s design greatly depends on the theme and/or builder that you use (unless you custom-build your website).
Outdated design trends include:
Sidebars with tons of stuff on them
‘Cheesy’ sliders
Infinite scrolling
4. Your Website Is Not Mobile-Optimized
If we have not hit this point home hard enough by now, then here it is again: everything you do online needs to be mobile-optimized, especially your website. Go to your website on your mobile phone right now.
How does it look? Are the proportions of your content fitting correctly within your screen?
If not, then before you doing anything else on your website, you need to make sure that it looks great on mobile.
Here is a short video describing why having a GREAT website matters so much.
Curious how your website stacks up? Request your Online Visibility Report and we’ll let you know.