Common Web Designing Mistakes

Your website is the real estate where you live and do business online and it’s a no-brainer that you need the best web design to increase your bottom-line sales and to leave a long-lasting impression on your visitors. Successful websites must be user-friendly, and there shouldn’t be any complaints arising from difficulty in using your site. There can be a long list of mistakes commonly seen in web designs but let’s talk about the more common ones here:

1. Your web content cannot be read smoothly. This may be due to the type of font, the size of the font, or a lack of contrast between the font and the background colors. Seems simple, but it’s easy to forget even when you’ve got loads of things piled up for your new start-up. Ask friends to visit your site and leave an honest feedback about usability.

2. You write content thinking it’s the 1980s. The WWW is a fast-paced environment and content that isn’t specifically written for this environment is downright frustrating. As a rule of thumb, a comprehensive article should contain between 500 and 750 words (1000 words for interesting, controversial niches); more than that and visitors begin to lose interest, unless you are an exceptional copywriter. For casual blogposts, you better have them between 250-500 words.

3. Poorly embedded links. Make clickable links clear by placing the anchor text in a different color. Also, too many embedded links in close proximity can result in confusion for users.

4. Slow loading! Poor design or coding can cause a lag in page loading. Contemporary users are usually accustomed to instant access, and become impatient and navigate away from the site otherwise. Sometimes, slow loading may also trigger an error message and the user may rarely return thinking your site remains down.

5. Excessive use of Flash. Unless a website absolutely requires it to illustrate a product, it is best to avoid Flash. Once a useful tool, it’s out of fashion now thanks to a prolonged 56kbps era and the difficulty search engine bots face when crawling Flash sites.

6. Use of thumbnails only, especially in an e-commerce site. Thumbnails were ‘in’ circa 2000, but web 2.0 users now prefer larger photos. Inadequate photo size prevents potential customers from seeing the product in detail. If that’s the case, they may not feel like ordering your product. Also take into account the quality of photos when uploading larger versions.

7. Not enough contact information. It isn’t enough to have a phone or email address on a site. You should also include a physical address as this makes a business seem more real and substantial. This is all the more needed as Google now takes this into account to rank you for location-specific results. And if visitors have to provide private data like for newsletter subscriptions, you should have a clear privacy policy too.

8. Last but not the least is browser incompatibility. This wasn’t an issue circa 2000 when Internet Explorer was THE browser, but things have changed now. The powerful add-ons supported by Firefox have made it the browser of choice for most tech-savvy people. You should be careful about Chrome, Opera and Safari too if you are a large site.

And yes, pay heed to comments. That’s where users out their anger and likeness. If you’ve come all the way till here reading, comments aren’t too far away from here! What do you say?

Adam Ali writes for GoldenWebDesign.com, an SEO web development company with offices in several US cities.