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Having a website can give your business a promising image, but a bad website can be detrimental to your brand. You don’t want to miss out on potential clients, so it’s essential you are aware of what constitutes bad web design. Knowing that will help you improve your current site for the better; doing so will help you to upgrade your brand and once again give your business potential.
It is a very subjective matter of what constitutes good web design. Some people think it needs to have an extremely elegant and futuristic appearance for a website to have good web design. Others want to make web design as simple as possible as long as it is functional and serves the purpose of their business.
Regardless of the preferences of the business owner, there are some aspects to avoid when designing a website.
Mistake #1: Poor content
Surely by now and with good reason you’ll have heard the phrase ‘content is king’. Content is what drives people to visit your website – irrespective of where you’re in the business field, people want to find out what you have to offer.
And when a website has poorly written content, or even worse, a bare website, it’s always a frustrating experience. It doesn’t add much value to your potential clients and will discourage them from ever visiting your website again.
Mistake #2: Poor layout
Even if you have some excellent content on your website, if your clients can’t find it, it’s absolutely useless. Too many websites are like a digital maze – there is no meaning in menu systems, pages are hidden away, and there are no contact details to be found anywhere.
After a few minutes of searching for that much-needed information, visitors to your website will just drop off and you will be left without a business opportunity. And this because of an encounter with badly organized website design.
Mistake #3: Not mobile-friendly
With more than half of Google searches being done on a mobile device, it’s just a big no to have a website that isn’t designed for mobile. You’re already cutting your potential web traffic down by half, because nobody likes using a static website on a mobile device.
If you’re lucky, some visitors will scrape through to read your content. But not getting a web design that meets modern standards reveals something about your business – you’re old-fashioned and don’t care for new business trends.
Mistake #4: Not tell user what your company does and why they should choose you
This is probably the biggest offender. Why? Because users will form an opinion in .05 seconds once your page loads. You can get everything else right, but if a user on your website can’t make a justified decision, they will hit the back button, particularly if they are in the B2B sector.
Approximately 46% of customers will leave a website immediately unless it is obvious what the company is doing. At the very least, you should have a clear picture of your services / products as well as confidence-building elements such as testimonials, awards and industry affiliates.
Mistake #5: Font sizes too small and not reader-friendly
Have you ever found yourself squinting over a website to read the text? It’s not ideal, and if you’re like most internet users, you just plain don’t have time for that nonsense.
One of the most common flaws on the website is text that is too hard to read. Body text should be higher than 14px, and all body copies should be in a Sans Serif font, making it more accessible and reader-friendly across device types and at smaller sizes. When you need to squint to read the text on a mobile device for your website, it is time to have a discussion with your web designer.
Mistake #6: Lots of links that open new browser windows
That is the first step down a slippery slope to a bad user experience. It welcomes a user leaving your site, but there is no “back” button to get them back to your website. Another downer? Opening multiple browser windows at a time not only makes navigation difficult (especially on a mobile device), but they also eat up bandwidth — which can slow down somebody’s devices and ruin their whole online experience essentially.
Mistake #7: Social media icons at the top of your website
This is a common issue websites have, and encourages users to leave the site immediately while encouraging distraction. They fall into a scrolling rabbit hole once they leave your site for social media and may never return to your site. Put them on the side. Put them in the middle. Put them at the bottom. Put them anywhere but the top.
Mistake #8: Links and buttons that aren’t big enough to click
Have you ever tried to click a mobile website around, but each button you clicked was so tiny that the page you ended up on was a crapshoot? Buttons and links are too frequently designed as small clickable “mouse” links and buttons not intended for human fingers. With mobile traffic rising at more than 60%, these links and buttons need to have enough space and size to tap and navigate quickly to the desired action or website.
Mistake #9: Does not have contact information
When on the homepage of a company, 64% of visitors want to see the contact information of the company, and 44% of visitors will leave if there is no contact information or phone number. The end goal of your website’s user interface should be to build a conversion by making a user interact with you. They will become disappointed and a missed opportunity if they can not find your phone number, address, contact form, email or other forms of contact.
You can avoid having these problems with your website – CONTACT US today at MI Web Designer, Malaysia’s favourite web design company.
