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 aren’t necessarily bad, but they can be problematic if you’re designing for different devices. Therefore, you should test your designs on as many platforms as possible.

Light texts are very easy to read on a wide range of devices. The thin text helps people who can’t see well or have poor eyesight. Some apps even use thin text as standard. However, some users prefer thick fonts for reading. Sometimes, when there are too many thin fonts, the text starts looking messy and unreadable.

It would help if you avoided thin fonts. Make sure your type is easy to read by choosing a font size that is comfortable for the user. Avoid using too many fancy fonts. Your website needs to be readable no matter what device your users use.

Above all, the text must be readable. Your interface should be easy to use. Typography isn’t everything, though. Make sure that the font size is large enough for those who need it.

Legibility is important for good readability as well. Users must read text on your site to use it effectively.

Too Complicated Registration Forms

Registration forms should be short and easy to fill out. Please don’t bother trying to make them complicated. Just ask people to do what’s necessary to get started.

Should you need to add more information after someone starts filling things out, use a tiered approach. Load up the first few questions, load up the next tier, then load up another tier. You could even create an option to start without any questions asked.

Too Many Elements

It would help if you designed business websites to load fast and keep visitors happy. For example, they shouldn’t contain lots of different objects or information.

Make sure you present key information right away on your web page. This includes your name, address, phone number, or other contact information. Don’t make visitors search around your site for this info. Instead, you should include some basic contact forms if somebody wants to ask you questions. Also, make sure you have easy navigation options available, so people know how to get around your site without having to scroll down far.

Make sure you explain the most important information on your website right away. Keep it succinct! Don’t waste time conveying everything on your site on one page. Business owners should be aware of this rule of thumb.

Too Many Popup Windows

Popups are usually annoying and distracting. However, you may use them since they help users understand your page content. You must make sure that the popup does not cover any part of the screen and that users have an option to close it.

A popup window is an annoying element of web pages when the user is focused on something else. This is also a common mistake. Try to make popup windows as unobtrusive as possible. It would help if you allowed users to close them by clicking anywhere on the page. Please don’t ask them to read your instructions. Ask them if they need help.

Too Minimalist

Business websites with minimalistic designs are great for minimal space. But it’s also a big mistake. For example, you should use a minimalist style if you’re selling clothes online but do not want your website cluttered with many images and videos.

Instead of having lots of images, you could have a few simple, clean images that emphasize what you sell instead of making people wonder what else there might be. You may also consider using white text on a black background color.

White backgrounds make things easy to read, while black backgrounds make things difficult to see. If you are trying to get more information about your products or services, you should use images and video because these visuals help people understand what you’re offering.

To End

Now, you can avoid the most common mistakes web designers make, so it’d be easier to create a more functional website. Do you need some help with your online presence and digital marketing campaign? Give us a call here at ITD Web Design, and our professional team will gladly assist you.