Monday, April 18, 2011

What Are The 5 Biggest Web Design Mistakes?

The top mistake that people make with web design is to use Flash on their site. You have to put your visitors first and there is no doubts that Flash sites look good but this is unlikely to impress. People are looking for information not how good your web designer’s Flash skills are – give them what they are looking for.


Not all of your visitors will have mega broadband connections and what will appear quickly to some will take an age for others and will more than likely have them clicking the back button through frustration. Give people what they want straight away as that is what they are expecting and it would be stupid to disappoint them wouldn’t it? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.


Don’t create your site with links to everything under the sun on each page like a catalog and you will avoid mistake number two. People do this because they fear that they will miss out on that sale if they don’t display everything prominently. There is no evidence to support that this works.


There are several studies of online marketing which demonstrate that too much choice often ends up as no choice and this will not make you any sales. Information overload like this will overwhelm your visitors and they will look elsewhere as they don’t want to experience this. It is better to organize your site into product categories and help your visitors further by adding a search box.


Creating a site that the top search engines Yahoo, Bing and Google can’t find is the third biggest mistake that you can make with web design. Writing for visitors and not for search engines is a view held by many web design experts. It is true that your visitors should be your priority, but it is also fairly easy to optimize your content for the search engines as well.


The smart thing to do is to see what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for plumbers in London. Let’s assume that the majority of people are searching for “Plumber in London". Well the web site needs to be optimized for this term. You need these keywords to appear a few times in your site and in the description and title of the web page. That way Google and the others will understand that your company is a plumber in London.


The fourth mistake is having too many images on your web site. The more images you have, the more likely you are to avert your visitor’s attention from your core message and your page will be slow. Top search engines like Google are now cracking down on slow loading sites. Online research companies have found that a web site has around seven seconds to satisfy its readers. If your site takes longer than that to load they will hit the back button faster than you can say “too slow".


And the final mistake in web design is to have your site design and content produced by people with no online marketing experience. Your web site should be your shop window where you want people to buy what you have to offer, contact you for more information or join your email newsletter list for further communications. You can get your web designer to produce a fancy design but write the content yourself or hire a good copywriter to do this.

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