Having a well designed business website is vital for engaging customers and converting them into sales. Without the right design, you’re likely to turn prospects away without them giving you a serious chance. In order to ensure that you’re business is practicing proper web design techniques, let’s discuss 3 of the most common design mistakes and how you can avoid them.
1) Lack of Organization
Perhaps the most common mistake is failing to properly organize a website. When potential customers land on your website, they will want to quickly find the information they are looking for without spending a lot of time in the process. If they feel overwhelmed with an abundance of content without proper organization, it’s likely that they will simply leave and buy from a competitor.
This will obviously have negative effects and can increase your bounce rate while reducing your overall conversion rate. For this reason, it should be your prerogative to effectively break your content down into easily digestible information. An example would be placing content into categories on the main menu of your website. This might include having sections that contain your business information, products, blog, contact information, etc.
2) Excessive Content
While you will definitely want to provide enough content to meet the needs of your customers, going overboard can have negative results. For example, adding too many pictures and videos at one time can be annoying and increase the amount of time it takes for your website to load. Writing overly lengthy articles can also be bad because it’s often difficult for visitors to digest information and get what they’re looking for.
To prevent this problem, it’s smart to stick with the basics and convey the information you need to get across without overdoing it. This means that you should keep images and videos to a minimum and make sure that the ones you use are highly relevant and offer true value to your visitors.
You may also want to keep articles or blog posts relatively short. In most cases, 400 to 600 words per article is sufficient. If you have extra information, it’s smart to break it down into a series of articles and use headers and/or bulleted lists to appeal to people who simply want to skim your content.
3)Not Standing Out from the Masses
In addition, many businesses get themselves into trouble when their website looks generic and doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. While it’s not usually necessary to reinvent the wheel, you should make sure that your website has it’s own personality and conveys the philosophy of your business.
For example, you might want to hire a graphic designer to create a customized logo to place in the header of your website. You may also want to include a page about your business including a brief history, pictures of your employees and anything else of interest. Doing so will give your site more of a personalized feel that should make it easier to connect with your customer base.
Along with this, you might want to look at some of your main competitors’ sites and figure out some ways that you can exceed them. THis should make your visitors’ experience a positive one and you are likely to get better conversion rates.
Attached Images:
- License: Creative Commons image source
Baron Hunter is a web designer and author of the Web Designer’s Resource Guide, which is available free online.