5 Common Website Mistakes- and How to Fix Them
Websites can be a great business tool, when done correctly. However, if a website has design flaws or isn’t easy to navigate, it may not be solving your business woes. We have compiled the 5 most common mistakes we see in web design, and how to fix them! If your website includes these things, we aren’t here to shame you! Tweaking these mistakes will make a huge difference in how your site appears to users, and how they respond to it.
Too Many Different Fonts
Fonts can be a great tool, but if you have included too many different fonts on your web page, it can be distracting to the eye- as well as look junky. We recommend using no more than 3 font types- One font for headings, one for subheadings, and one for paragraph text. These can, and should, be different sizes- depending on the location on your page.
Cluttered Navigation
A home page web design must be neat, easy to navigate, and not cluttered. Often web visitors come across a home page that offers too many links, leaving them uncertain of where to find what they need. Your navigation menu (the menu at the top of your website), should really only have 4-5 items. Try editing these down to 4-5 and adding subsections under them to make navigation easier. Another place to look is the user experience for your site. Are pages easy to find? Does the layout of your site make sense to someone not familiar with your business or industry? We recommend having a clean, organized website- with a reasonable number of options, menu items, and images. This makes your website appear professional, neat, and credible.
Too Much Text
Your website should be informative, but also not too wordy. Confusing, right? The truth is, most people don’t read text in it’s entirety anymore- they skim. You want your website copy to be easy to skim, straight to the point, and separated into easy to digest bits of information. If your website has giant blocks of texts, users are most likely going to find the information they want somewhere else. We talked about more writing the copy for your website on the blog last week, here.
Not Mobile Friendly
In 2015, Google started favoring websites with mobile friendly design higher in it’s rankings. “Mobile Friendly” simply means that a website is designed to appear differently on cell phones and tablets. It resizes navigation, images, and text to fit on the screen of a smaller device. If your website hasn’t been redesigned since then, it definitely needs a refresh. Mobile devices drive more than half of web traffic, and 40% of online shoppers have said that if a website isn’t mobile friendly, they will go to a competitor instead. We definitely don’t want that! We previously covered how to tell if your website needs a re-design on the blog, here.
No Have Clear Call to Action
A “Call to Action” is what you ultimately want the visitors of your website to do. Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter? Buy a product? Visit your socials? Read a blog post? Whatever it may be, make that the goal of your website. This should be at the top of the website, a navigation menu item, or be made clear throughout the site. Users shouldn’t have to guess why you want them there. Make it easy for them to make the choices you want them to make.
