Common Website Mistakes To Avoid During Design Stage

Building a website is an intensive undertaking that you should not gamble with at all costs. This is because the success of your website starts right with its design. Research shows that a website’s first impression is 94% design-related and 75% of people make up judgement on a company’s credibility by its website design. Unfortunately, most businesses end up with ineffective websites by making several website mistakes in the design stage. To make sure you don’t fall into this category, we are going to discuss common web design mistakes that have rendered many websites ineffective.

Common Website Mistakes to Avoid

(i) Chaotic Homepage

A renowned statistician and professor, Edward Tufte once said, “Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.” A major killer for many website is a cluttered homepage, often triggered by the desire of wanting to capture almost everything about your business on the main page.

Always know that your website’s visitors will make a lot of opinion about your business from the first sight of your homepage. With this in mind, you should make sure that in as much as you want to impress them, don’t scare them away. Ensure clarity and conciseness. A busy homepage is also disastrous because it makes the page heavy and consequently, increases loading time. Read more on why simple websites convert.

(ii) Complicated Navigation and Poor Menu Layout

An easy navigation design and menu layout is paramount for every website. There are sites that have very complicated navigation bars and poor menu layouts. From today, know that on average, web visitors will look for common navigation bars and menu for around 4 seconds after the page fully loads. If they find it hard to navigate around, they quickly move to another website; probably your competitor’s website.

With this in mind, there’s need to make sure your site is easy to use and navigate. First, make sure navigation bars are placed on visible locations with textual description and it outstanding colors and fonts. Also, the menu should be clear and legible with most important and major services at the visitors’ vicinity.

(iii) Unfriendly Screen Resolution

Even though most designers may boast of having the best responsive website designs, they fail in choosing the best screen resolutions which make the entire design a whack. You must have come across websites that you have to scroll horizontally. Such websites are annoying and have very low visitor retention rates.

A good and up-to-date designer knows that the recommended optimized resolution for modern websites is 1024 x 768. However, it is not advisable to use a specific resolution in the design. Instead, use a liquid layout which adjusts to the user’s screen size. Liquid layouts can adjust from 800×600 to 1280×1024 pixels.

Read about the best web design screen resolution.

(iv) Too Many Poorly Timed and Unsolicited Pop-Ups

Websites nowadays have capitalized on pop-ups that have so far proved to be a worthy investment. However, these pop-ups can be detrimental if used too much, improperly timed and especially if they are unsolicited. Most websites have too many pop-ups that immediately pop up even before the visitor views the page. To be honest, we all don’t like pop ups and they are an instant turn off for a majority of the people. Statistics indicate that 50% of all pop-up ads are closed before they finish loading and over 10 million users use Ad blockers.

In as much as you would like to use pop up ads, use them with caution. Make sure they are properly timed and appear on a less annoying place for example on the corners of the web page as opposed to the center of the page.