Common Web Design Mistakes

With consumers increasingly turning to the Internet to make purchasing decisions, an effective website design is absolutely crucial. When done well, a website serves as the crux of your digital presence, communicating your brand image and converting customers at high rates. Even minor problems can sully your reputation and prevent customers from sticking around.

Five Common Web Design Misses

1. Failing to Optimize For Mobile
No matter what your niche, a large proportion of your traffic is going to come from mobile viewers, meaning the first impression of your company often comes from the mobile site. Failing to use proper responsive design principles is one of the easiest ways to lose these customers as they become frustrated with your website. In fact, Google has already started indexing mobile first. Mobile-first indexing means Google will predominantly use the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking.

2. Intrusive or Annoying Advertisements
Advertisements or calls-to-action are often a key conversion point but utilized incorrectly, they can be a huge nuisance to many consumers. Overcrowding every negative space with ads, forcing pop-ups, or engaging in overly-intrusive targeted marketing campaigns all have the potential to backfire, losing more revenue as they decrease conversions. Pop-ups and full-screen newsletter sign-ups have their place, but there's a fine line between increasing conversions and getting on someone's nerves.

3. Lack of a Clear Structure
A user's path through a website should always be clear both within individual pages and when navigating between pages. This is why web designers meticulously wireframe and design sites before beginning to code them. Failure to carefully consider user experience at every level of organization weakens your message and confuses your visitors.

4. Inconsistent Design Choices
As design trends come and go, it's common to take a buffet approach to website design. But picking and choosing an amalgam of trends doesn't keep you relevant, it makes you look unfocused. Your website should be another fully-integrated component of your marketing strategy, meaning fonts, colors, image styling, and tone all must be consistent throughout the site and throughout your branding.

5. Cost of Quality Development
Everyone likes to save a few bucks but going cheap on your website is a bad idea. Your website is the hub of what customers use to judge your company and your product or service. It may seem like a good idea to hire your niece or that freelancer you met at a BBQ last week but the reality is that website design and development has many components that require multiple levels of expertise. A good graphic designer is usually not also good at database architecture and neither of them would normally be good at front end development as well as their respective areas. The web is just moving too fast and sure you could "throw something up there" but is that what you want representing your company? In the end, you'll probably end up paying more than you would have otherwise.

5. Cool Effects at the Expense of Speed
A drawback of chasing trends is that designers can sometimes create a design that looks great but takes too long to load. It's essentially a poorly-optimized design. If your website doesn't load quickly and completely, people will leave. Sacrificing conversions for the sake of "cool" features or animations is a serious mistake. Google tracks how fast your site will load on a mobile phone connection. This miss can also occur with a well-designed site that was developed without attention to proper compression and minimization, making choosing an experienced developer all the more important.

Experts Take Care of the Details
At Neon Rain Interactive, we offer comprehensive, professional website designs that will never fall prey to rookie mistakes. Even small design misses can cost a great deal in the long run, so contact us today to learn about how we can perfect your web presence.