Yes (yes, yes…), you’ve been told countless times about how important it is to have a fast-loading and responsive website. In fact, when talking about website designing mistakes, the talk always starts – and ends – with speed and device-compatibility.
Admittedly, they are very important, both for SEO and UX. But they are also equally clichéd.
The sphere of website designing and development is much more than just these. So to stay at the top of your game, it is imperative that you explore this subject more closely, care about the ‘other’ details and make amendments in your own case.
To help you have a right start, here are 5 website designing mistakes (other than the clichés) that are silently killing your business:
Making it image-centric
Unless it’s about photography or something that’s heavily reliant on visuals, having an image-centric website is not necessarily the best decision. And there are plenty of reasons behind that.
First, using high quality images usually slows down the website. Two, texts in images can’t be crawled; so it hurts your SEO. Third, pictures are meant to add value to your message. If you’re irrelevantly using generic stock photo, you’re basically taking away their clarity and meaning, which might put off many website visitors.
So unless it’s necessary and your business demands it, use images but not obsessively. Limit their use and stick to texts.
TIP: Whitespaces aren’t bad!
Generic 404 Error Page
The easiest way to lose your website visitors is to display them a generic 404 Error page. When lost, they must be guided back to the right and relevant destination because they might not navigate back to a page where you want them to on their own.
In fact, in a survey of nearly 3,500 users, it was found that majority of them don’t even try to take a positive action to resolve the error. They simply exit the website.
So your website must have a personalized 404 error page that’s engaging enough to keep the visitors glued and engaged, and help then continue back to their original work without jinxing their experience.
Inconsistent and unreadable content
Website designing isn’t just about eye-candy images and colors. It’s just as much about text contents that must spilled around in right quantity and consistency to improve Users’ Experience.
So your website must have well-jeweled contents, in sufficient amount, throughout. Importantly, it must be readable with right fonts size, style and line-height.
Also, these contents mustn’t be hidden that weighs visitors to go on a content-hunting. Why? According to a research, 52 percent of visitors want to see “about us” information and 64 percent want to see “contact” information, once on company’s homepage.
If you have your contents veiled deep down, guess what these users will do? They will leave.
Complicated navigation
The worst thing that you can do to your website visitors is to make them wonder “where am I?”
Everyone wants to know where they are and how they can jump to someplace else that’s more relevant. As a designer and webmaster, it’s your duty to make navigation for the visitors quick and easy. It’s an important component of good UX.
So your website must have clear (and sufficient) menus, breadcrumb navigation and decent design cues to help the visitors know where they are and how they can get to some other place on the website.
Not minified HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Many people, including the designers, undermine the relevance of minimizing website codes. Having a simplified and clean version of HTML, CSS and JavaScript not only improves a website’s speed and overall performance but also directly impacts its SEO.
The codes of your website must be compact and stripped of all the unnecessary lines. Of course, you can go with DIY tools to do this. But things could get quite troubling if yours isn’t a simple website. It is best you hire a good
website design company in Kolkata.
You might have the best strategies in action and one of the most qualified
internet marketing companies by your side working to take your business to new heights on digital sphere. But if you haven’t got your website design correct, it’s all a waste.
Because like they say,
if the first step isn’t correct, the destination will never be right.
