A professional and SEO-friendly website is a prime requirement to gain new customers, establish credibility, and foster strong relations with clients. If your website is effective, responsive, and user-friendly, it provides the user an experience to remember; steady flow in targeted leads; and generate ongoing sales.

However, website design involves both art and science; a simple mistake may make your website dull and lead to a significant drop in your website’s Google ranking. Hence, our professionals have shared the some obvious web design mistakes to avoid for online business owners.

Mistake 1: Unclear Brand Message

Branding is one of the most important part of business marketing, and your brand message will fail to reach the target audience if you don’t lay it out right.

Messaging is one of the success factors for almost every big brand but it is a starting point for most of the online business brands. However, your brand message will be of no use if you fail to provide a clear message to your audience on your website.

How to fix this web design mistakes

The first thing to do is to have a brand image that stands out and communicates your brand message clearly. Your business logo design should embody your company vision and mission. The key here is to use a storytelling format, where you have to create compelling communication in front of your audience and emotionally connect to them. Your message should stand out from your beliefs and brand values to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

In this, online website owners are at an advantage-they can include motion in their logo designs or brand imagery to engage visitors and make them “listen” to the message.

In other words, your website contents should address the motivations and requirements of your target audience instead of highlighting your accomplishments or agenda. Brand messages should intend to resolve the pain points of your audience, let them understand the value your products give and build trust to drive more sales.

Mistake 2: Page Titles with Low Search Visibility

Search engine result pages are a crucial way by which prospects and users identify your website from competitors in the search engines. The page title of your website is the main tool to entice new visitors from SERPs, or allow your existing users to locate the specific pages on your website. Search engines highlight the initial 66 characters i.e. the title and hence, it is a micro-content. Many webmasters fail to include relevant information in page titles, thereby losing their potential traffic which is one of the biggest web design mistakes

What to Do

Page titles are useful as default entries in the Favorites section when users bookmark any website. If you want to create a page title for your home page, you should start entering your company name and a brief description of your website.

On the other hand, if you want to write page titles for internal pages of your website then you should begin it with the most informative words to mention the specifics of that page. As the page title is similar to the window title in the web browser, it is useful in identifying the respective window label present in the browser too.

Mistake 3: Inclusion of Non-Scanning Texts

A wall containing non-scanning text is painful and boring to read for users looking for an interactive experience.

What to Do

Online business owners should include well-documented content with skim readable layouts on their websites. Some suggestions are as follows-

• Highlighted keywords
• Bulleted lists
• Subheads
• Inverted pyramids
• Short paragraphs
• De-fluffed languages
• Simple writing style

Scanning is a habit of most readers in search of valuable and informative content. By making your content readable for your visitors, they are mostly to revisit your site whenever they need such information. Fans and readers eventually convert into customers, and that is a great motivation to include “skimmable” content on your website.

Mistake 4: Lack of Proper Analytics to Measure Performance 

Another major web design mistake is that business owners do not look at relevant data associated with the use of a website. In other words, most of the small business websites never use any analytic tool to measure the performance.

What to Do

You should consider the website as your investment. Hence, to protect it, you have to analyze the website’s progress and measure its success. You can track, test, and adjust the website performance by using Google Analytics or any other similar type of metric tools. The tool provides you a valuable piece of information on user behaviors and lets you establish goals to track your website conversion.

Mistake 5: Sharing Anything that Looks Like Advertisements

Selective attention is a problem prevalent among online users, and they usually stop paying attention to advertisements and visuals, which interfere in the way of goal-driven navigation. However, some users even ignore genuine or legitimate web design elements, which appear similar to prevalent advertisements.

What to Do

We recommend website designers and developers to avoid all such designs and visuals, which look similar to advertisements. Instead, change the flow of the page layout so that with each scrolled fold, the eyes see new attractive design.

And the final web design mistakes.

Mistake 6: Lack of Proper Call to Action

Missing words or sentences consisting of call-to-action at the end of a web page is a big mistake committed by business websites across the board.

What to Do

CTAs let your visitors focus on their next steps. It is also a prompt or command attached to a button or link. Website owners should use contents, which mention the value of their offered products and services combined with a compelling phrase to prompt immediate action.

You have to use clear language while writing a CTA and keep it as simple as possible. A good business website usually have effective CTAs such as: Get Started, Add to Shopping Cart, and Contact Us.

The success of an online business today depends solely on its business website. Therefore, while you outsource the web design task or design on your own, you have to avoid the mentioned web design mistakes to build an appealing website strictly.

Don’t make these web design mistakes, speak with your designer to make sure these are all included within your website package.

Author Bio

Maria Anton is a freelance content specialist who likes to help brands develop and grow. She writes about marketing, branding and advertising but open to other business topics as well. In her free time, she crochet knick knacks for her kids.