Building a business website is an awesome way to get your company’s brand out to the world and display your products or services to potential clients. However, before you spend a bunch of time doing it yourself or drop a load of money on a web design company, you need to make sure everything is going to be done correctly. Obviously you want your website to attract targeted leads and bring in more business, but there are a few errors you need to avoid or they could make your site worthless.
Keep these five potential mistakes in mind when creating your website or consulting with your web design service…
1) Not Giving Your Visitors Any Breathing Room
Yes, adding nice pictures, cool videos, compelling fonts, etc… can make your website look great but you need to know when it’s enough. People don’t like waiting for web sites to load and too many images, videos, and animations will slow your site down considerably. They can also distract the visitor from the actual content of your website that you really want them to find. Including some fancy web design features can be good but keep the main focus on the content and don’t overwhelm your visitors with too much stuff.
2) Not Mobile Friendly
Smartphones and tablets are becoming more mainstream every day. It seems as though just about everybody has one and those who don’t have one yet will be getting one soon. With each year that passes websites are being accessed by mobile devices more and more frequently. In fact, they will soon pass computers as the most used way for accessing the internet.
Therefore, your site needs to show up correctly on mobile devices. By default, most web sites are not very mobile friendly and are difficult to access and read on smartphones. There are now plenty of themes, plugins, and apps that will help make a website mobile friendly. So make sure yours is or you are making a huge mistake.
3) Not Enough White Space
You might think you need to take up every little bit of white space on the pages of your website. But that is simply not necessary and can actually have a negative impact if you do it. Some empty white space around images can make them pop and it will make your content much more clear to read. Having too much stuff crammed onto the page can distract the visitor and be very overwhelming, which will certainly make them click away from your site.
4) Excessive Spelling and Grammar Errors
There are few things that will drive your readers more crazy and completely ruin your site than having content full of spelling and grammar errors. You need to take the time to proofread your content and run it through a spelling/grammar checker before publishing it. That might seem obvious but you would be surprised how many people skip this simple step, and end up with sites full of errors making them look unprofessional and downright stupid in some cases!
5) Forgetting about SEO
One of the most vital parts of a successful website is the search engine optimization techniques implemented upon it. You will certainly want to learn about SEO and how to do it properly. I can’t go into detail here because it’s a topic that would require several full articles all by itself. But there is plenty of information out there about it so make sure you find a reliable source and learn how to do SEO correctly. Forgetting about this important step of web design would be a huge error on your part!
Never forget that your business website should be informing people about your company, products, and services while promoting your brand globally. It’s important not to make the above potentially devastating mistakes with your web design so it will be alluring, informative, and effectively portray your business image, while also capturing new customers.
