For any web facing business, a good website design is critical. Your website is the face of your company online. If users find your web page difficult or frustrating to navigate, or cannot find what they need on your website, you will likely lose customers. Fortunately, there are tips to help you address the 5 most common web design blunders.
1. Cluttered Content Layout
Users are on your website primarily for one reason – to find information that they need from your website. If you walked into a store with no customer service, and cannot find what you are looking for, would you visit that store again? Probably not. Web design is a lot like that, your website layout needs to be simple and easy to use even without any helps.
How To Address This Issue:
By maintaining a clean, uncluttered and organized content layout, users will have an easy time finding the information they need from your website. Aim for design that enables users to find what they are looking for without any helps in three clicks or less.
2. No Mobile Optimization
Did you know that currently nearly 52% of global web users are accessing the Internet through a mobile device? And the number is increasing everyday. While your website might look great on a laptop or a desktop computer, it can be challenging to access from a mobile phone. If mobile users are frustrated with your design elements, you are essentially giving up about half of your potential businesses.
How To Address This Issue:
Always design a website with mobile device in mind. This is known as responsive web design, which is implemented to provide an easy reading experience across a different set of devices whether it is a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet or a mobile phone. Aim for easy reading, interaction and navigation with a minimal resizing or scrolling required across all devices. Your website should be also able to automatically detect the type of device the user is accessing your site from, and displays the correct layout.
3. No Search Box Available
What happens if a user wants to find a specific piece of information quickly on your website? Instead of digging around through pages and pages of navigation, web users have become accustomed to being able to use a search tool. Failing to integrate this feature into your website can leave users feeling lost, and may lead them to hit the back button and find their information elsewhere.
How To Address This Issue:
Always integrate a fast, accurate search feature into any websites especially websites with a lot of content. Finding information on large pages can be a challenge, so aim to make this as simple as possible for the end users. There is also a Google custom search which can be implemented easily just by copy and pasting a piece of HTML code onto your website.
4. Not Including Correct Contact Information
Including your correct business contact information helps give legitimacy to your business. Sometimes users may want to be able to visit you locally, or talk on the phone to one of your service representatives, or sending you an email, or messaging you on social media. Make sure you have a contact page with correct information for all types of contact details. At a minimum, aim to have an email address, a phone number and a postal address. Failing to prominently feature contact information on your website can have the effect of tarnishing your credibility.
How To Addresses This Issue:
Always integrate an easy to find contact page to help the user better take advantage of your company’s products and services. Also provide as many ways as you can for customers to contact you.
5. Not Focusing on Users Experience
We all know the importance of proper search engine optimization, however we sometimes forget about the importance of users experience. How can this hurt your business? Some web design companies focus too much on building websites that look great to Google, but can appear awkward and forced to users. The problem with this is although you might be able to get a good search ranking, your conversion rate will suffer as users are reluctant to spend much time on your website.
How To Addresses This Issue:
Find a way to optimize your website in a way that does not hurt the users experience, consult with search engine optimization experts if required. For example, you can do this by subtly integrating your keywords into your page content to make sure that Google knows exactly what your website is about. Also make sure that users on the other hand will still be able to find all of the information they need easily and quickly when visiting your website, without any awkward feeling when reading your content.
Conclusion
Developing a website can be a complicated affair. It is important to work with a company that not only understands your needs as a business, but is also able to appeal to your client base. For more information and tips on effective web design for small businesses and enterprises visit Digiweb Media, a Wollongong website design company.
