As the web design industry evolves, new design trends come into play every year. And with that comes increased competition and more options for clients looking to build their next projects.
Remember that no two projects are alike. The key to success is understanding what makes your client unique and addressing those common issues within your busy designs.
As we’ve seen, there are many ways to go wrong with a website. Unfortunately, common website design mistakes happen often. Let’s look at a closer look at some of the biggest website mistakes, plus some design tips to help you by.
Here Are17 Most Common Mistakes Web Designers Do During Website Building
It’s easy to fall into the trap of making common website design mistakes. However, if it’s been a while since you’ve designed a website, or if you’re just getting started, there are some common mistakes web designers make. First, we’ll talk about the most common mistakes businesses do.
Always Think of Your Target Audience
Designers should always think about what their target market wants. A website or other digital project should speak to them and make them comfortable with your brand. This is accomplished by ensuring every aspect of the project (including colors, fonts, text, images, etc.) matches the brand guidelines.
Bad and Incorrect Color Combination
Color and contrast isn’t easy issue to deal with. But unfortunately, many amateur designers think they can get away with this common web design mistake.
You need to learn about the color wheel and the color theory and understand how contrast works. In addition, many online tools help you make sure your eye-catching colors fit together well visually.
Confusing Brand Messaging
Confused messaging may be one of those sneaky bad website design mistakes which make your company stand out from other companies. Messaging is a successful success factor for all major brands. But when it comes to small businesses, confused messaging is becoming more common. If you want to stand out from other business sites, make sure you pay attention to how you communicate.
Confusing messages should be avoided by businesses as much as possible. If confusion occurs, it is usually because the message was poorly written and sent out too late. Avoid sending confusing messages when you launch your new product to prevent problems. Then, wait until you know what the public wants before sending out any potentially confusing information.
The secret sauce is in the storytelling.
As a business owner, you want to ensure that when people think about your company, it makes you unique and different. You want to convey the value of your product or customer service by using words that communicate your point of view and beliefs.
A variety of typefaces, the color scheme, styles, and other visual elements on your site may appear confusing to visitors. These things make it hard to tell what kind of site you have. Choose one thing, such as a logo or a certain font that makes sense to you, and stick with it throughout your site.
A design should be cohesive in every aspect of the web page. Visual elements must fit together. For example, eye-catching colors should coordinate with fonts and logos. Design elements such as text and buttons should have similar layouts. Every component of the page should work together and support one another.
Brand messaging should be framed to ensure that your brand is understood by everyone who might buy your product or service. Therefore, your content marketing must address individual needs and expectations. To be effective, you must know your audience. Only then can you craft messages that resonate.
More self-talk should be used as an opportunity to build rapport in their customer journey. To start this conversation, you need first to understand what the customer journey is and what they want (pain point), ask them questions about how you could help them, and then discuss this topic. Once you’ve done this, you’ll get the chance to sell to them.
Horrible Images
Photos and graphics are vital parts of web design. Businesses should make sure to hire designers who know how to create high-quality photos and graphics. Poorly made images will only confound readers. Unrelated images will only lead viewers away.
Stock photos are images taken from other sources and put on your site without any alterations to make them unique. You will enhance the quality of your website if you use high-quality stock photography because it makes your page more professional. Use these as a way to enrich your blog content instead of filling up space.
Generic stock photos are useless. They give no insight into what an object looks like, nor what it means. You should avoid generic stock photos. Images that add information and clarity are better than those that do nothing but distract. Incorrect Ad Positions
Incorrect Ad Positions
Ads need to be placed somewhere for people to read them. So placing ads on the sidebar is fine when no other distractions get in the way. But when there are other things to do besides read ads, such as checking email or going to another page, the sidebar is distracting and reduces your chances of getting clicked on by users.
Many popup ads can be annoying because they block out the rest of the screen and take over the entire browser window. As a result, some bloggers prefer to disable popup windows completely. This may reduce their chance of being clicked upon, but this also limits their ability to collect information about what people are doing on their site.
Mobile Un-friendliness
Your site must be mobile-friendly and have a responsive web design. Make sure it works well on cellular phones or tablets. Responsive design will help your customers get information quickly without using a computer.
The majority of users are browsing on smartphones or tablets. Smartphones are getting more popular than desktops, but they still aren’t as common as laptops. Most people are online with their phones and tablets.
Mobile sites need to be optimized for performance. Users are likely to leave an app if it takes too long to load or works poorly.
Users would go to another site if their current user experiences weren’t satisfactory. Having a more positive experience than your competition will drive traffic. Your competitors’ successes may be why people are leaving your site.
Mobile sites need to be easy to navigate, responsive, fast loading, and user friendly. Users will not recommend business websites with poorly designed mobile sites. Business websites should make sure that all relevant content is easily accessible on every device. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile users and devices.
Users prefer shopping online if they can do it while on a mobile device. Unfortunately, desktops and laptops are no longer as popular’ mobile devices are. Therefore, a website should be designed to work well on smartphones and tablets, and desktop computers.
Navigability Issues
Your website should be easy to navigate. People shouldn’t spend that much time figuring out how to get around your site. It would also help ensure people know what each page does before getting there.
Visitors must be able to navigate through your website without any problems. Therefore, your website content needs to be clear and easy to understand.
Visitors might want to know what you do or how you started doing it. Or they may be interested in learning more about your products. So please make sure there are internal linking to the places they can go next. And, if possible, include some information on why someone would use your product.
A high bounce rate indicates an unstructured website layout. Make sure you have well-organized internal linking throughout your website. Ensure that clear labels on each page describe what the user will see when visiting. Make sure that every item on the website is linked to another page.
Your site needs a cleaner design. Make sure you put more information about your company, your design services, products, and how people can contact you directly. Cleaning up your site should make it easier for users to find what they want, resulting in higher conversion rates.
A clear navigation bar and lots of links to other parts of the site help your search engine ranking. Don’t clutter up your website; make sure everything is easy to find; it’s not rocket science. This helps boost your ranking in search results.
No Call to Action
Your CTA should be clear and concise. Make sure your CTAs stand out and get noticed by your users.
Your call-to-action should be clear and concise as possible. You want them to take action right away, even if they know nothing about you or your products. Don’t use long copywriting unless you’re looking for an award.
Visitors should be alerted about what they’ll get from visiting and what information they should fill out. This will help them understand the importance of preparing when submitting their information.
Don’t be annoying. People annoyed by sales pitches aren’t likely to buy anything from you. So your call to action should be clear and easy to follow. Offer an incentive as well as the product or service you’re selling. And don’t make them wait too long before showing up.
No Contact Info
You must be available when people call or email you. This includes working business hours and answering calls during off-business hours. You must also set up an easy way for potential customers and clients to contact you.
Visitors must be very sure about who they trust. So make sure that you offer people a clear means by which they can reach you. This will help visitors quickly navigate your website and give them the confidence that they’ll get hold of you if they need to easily.
A website should always include a call-to-action button to lead users to an easy contact form. It would help if you designed call-to-actions to get users into action quickly without taking more than 3 seconds to complete. Finally, include any links or social network buttons you want your visitors to see when they’re finished filling out the form.
Here’s how to pull this off:
- Put the number in the header.
- Reduce the number of clicks
- Add a “Contact us” page link in the main menu bar. This allows users to easily navigate our contact information or email support if they need help quickly.
- Don’t be afraid of social media. Answer questions about the business and answer them quickly. Your potential customers will appreciate it!
You should always include a contact page on your well-designed website. This is because visitors often use the Contact Page as an entry point into your site. By adding this page directly to your navigation menu, you make it easy for people to communicate to you if they have any questions or comments about your company.
Not Prioritizing Lines and Grids
You should organize your website design in a grid system to make your website more flexible, easy to read, and maintainable. It would help if you also used absolute positioning, percentages, and media queries to make your site mobile-friendly.
You can create seamless user experiences using CSS technology without using media queries by using grids, row, and column layout techniques. You also use the min-max property to eliminate the need to use breakpoints. However, you use grid-area property to achieve the same thing.
Not Using a Custom Design
A template is usually used for designing the layout of web pages. But for any new product, a template might be too common. In addition, people will recognize your site as another website by seeing the same template. So using a unique template could help you outsell other competitors.
You should use a unique design process for your website because it doesn’t matter if people know how to navigate your site or not. Template designs are used everywhere nowadays. They may seem simple, but they’re still very useful.
Poor Kerning
Poor kerning, tracking, & leading kerning, refers to the spaces in-between two characters. The spacing between your words and phrases should be consistent. Consistency in spacing is important because it helps readers understand what you’re saying.
Leading means to the space between the lines of text. A smaller or larger amount of leading makes your readers’ eyes strain to recognize the meaning of your message.
Kerning errors make it hard to read the text. Tracking errors cause problems with the layout. Leading issues often make the text unreadable by making words run up and down the page. It would help if you fixed typography mistakes before any persuasion takes place.
Poor White Space and Font Usage
Fonts play an important role when writing quality content. Make sure the font size is easy to read at any distance. Use bolded texts to emphasize the message and italicized texts for emphasis. Layouts should be appealing to the eyes and easy to navigate.
Typefaces convey your brand image in addition to the actual words you write. So make sure you pick a legibly attractive font.
Make good use of white space. Use large blocks of text. Don’t incorporate anything into your website that you wouldn’t want to see on a billboard or magazine cover.
Break content into sections that make sense. Use visuals as much as possible. Don’t ever leave your site unattended! Customers don’t want a broken down site or a dead site. Always update your relevant content whenever there’s an update.
Thin Fonts
Thin fonts