Building a website can be daunting.
But the real challenge lies in making it usable.
The difficultly is that most web designers don’t understand that the website wasn’t created for themselves but to solve the user’s needs. They give importance to creativity over usability.
Here are the 8 mistakes you should avoid in website designing.
Difficult navigation
Avoid making your visitors work too hard to find the content they are looking for whether it is menus, drop down menus, or absolutely no menu at all.
Navigating your website should be easy and spontaneous. Similarly, don’t place everything on the homepage and forego navigation altogether.
Long pages and huge blocks of text that are not scan-able will send site visitors running to hit the back button.
Making the content clear, visible, and available gives visitors and reason to return.
And above all, they’ll emphasis on the purpose of your website and not on any design flaws.
Spelling and grammar error
Everything posted on the website should be proofread.
That means no grammatical, spelling, and punctuation mistakes. Simple errors can make you look unprofessional.
With mobile phones and tabs, posting on the go is easy but updating too speedily might mean auto correct errors or typing mistakes sneak their way in.
Poor use of header, footer, and sidebar
Heading area, footers, and sidebars; people often think that they are designed for advertisements.
However, it’s a big red flag when a website shows a high number of banners and ads, especially when there is little content to go along with it.
Within the site these areas can be much better used for additional navigation.
It’s not wrong to place a banner across the top of the page advertising a special promotion.
Using huge media files
Images that are not optimized for size, can slow down your web pages and in turn, your page rank.
Make sure you are using the optimal media file format for your web page:
In many cases, images with mostly solid colors or with transparent background must be protected as pngs, svgs, and gfs, Videos should be protected as MP4 and audio files should be protected as MP3s.
The next step is to make sure it’s sized properly. From a phone or a camera, a common mistake that people make is to simply upload photos directly which are usually 3-5 times larger. Your image must be resized to be no longer than the largest they will be displayed to your website.
Then of course, you have to compress it. If you’re already using a professional image editing program like Photoshop, at your fingertips, you have powerful compression tools, but if not, then you can find numerous effective options online.
Hard to read content
Gone are those days, when consumers used to be excited by all the open information available on the internet.
Consumers now value their time today above most commodities. Instead of large paragraphs of text just provide them with the only information they want, and make it easy to read for them.
Writing for the web is different from writing a book.
Digital copywriters now use a different style that attracts to the features of the online reader.
They also use their skills to ensure that your content is observed by the search engines.
Here are some suggestions from a digital copywriter on how to make effective web copy
- Organize content into pages
- Use headlines
- Add graphic elements
- Use short paragraphs
Pops-ups
Pops-ups are irritating, pointless, and force visitors to alter numerous windows and pages instead of simply hitting back button to return to where they were.
In their browser many people keep their pop-up feature turned on which means that they either have to approve each pop-up the site throws at them, or they miss content.
Avoid using advertisement and dangerous spam with pop-up.
Not keeping a website updated
The digital era has bought us amazing new technological advances. It has also opened up cyber-security risks.
WordPress Specific Tips:This is the reason why keeping themes and plugins fully updated is necessary in modern times. It certifies that every possible entry point is secured on your domain.
One more tip for solid website security is to install a real-time protection like Wordfence or iThemes Security, plus a CAPTCHA option to thwart automated attacks.
Lack of page design stability
When pages belong to the same website and quite different in design, it confuses users since switching to another section may look like going to an entirely different site.
Furthermore, if position of navigation black changes from page to page the site looks disorganized.
In order to maintain design stability:
- On every page, use the same color scheme
- Use icons following the same pattern
- On every page, make sure vertical and horizontal spacing between the features is identical
- The size of titles from different pages must be similar.
- Don’t change the place of navigation on different pages unless you are completely sure you know what you are doing and it’s correct.
- Stick to the same link formatting.
Final words
In every step of design process keep your target audience and brand image in your mind from planning to post-launch analysis.
So before continuing to actual design, make sure you fully understand your client needs and have received all the important information.
Author bio:
Cruz Petar is a Top Rated freelance writer and the owner of the leading website design company in California. Cruz lives in CA United State, and she enjoys teaching his clients the finer points of online marketing and website design and development.