Nowadays having a good looking website is not always enough to attract potential customers, most customers don’t care about how good looking your website is, they more often than not care about content and what you really offer.
Many small business owners design their own websites to save costs, this sometimes turns our pretty good but in most cases they make a lot of mistakes that costs them a lot of potential business.
1-Not paying attention to grammar and spelling.
This is a common mistake that A lot of new businesses tend to make while creating a website.
A website that is riddled with typos and grammar mistakes doesn’t inspire confidence.
In order for your customers to trust you, Your website has to be free of these easy to fix mistakes.
If you can’t do it yourself, hire a professional to proofread the text for you, you can find affordable copywriters on fiverr.com or similar websites.
There are also great tools that you can use to make sure your spelling and grammar are impeccable such as grammarly.com
In short INK is an amazing word editor that not only checks your spelling and grammar for you but it can tell you which sentences are hard to read and optimizes your document for search engines.
If you’re still not convinced about the importance of spelling and grammar, then check out this article written in the BBC on how spelling mistakes can cost millions in lost revenue.
2-using the wrong stock imagery
Very often website creators chose images that are not suitable for their website, they usually go for the easy ones they find on Google.com
Even worse is using some cheap looking stock images that remind us of the WordArt era.
Using google to find images is bad because normally images you find on google are copyrighted, this means you cannot use them for free on your website.
In most cases you need to purchase an image before you can use it on your website.
These websites offer free unlimited images that you can use on your website.
Another alternative if you have the budget is paying for a premium membership in a website like Envato Elements.
Envato Elements gives you a load of images that you can use for your website plus a ton of other useful things, including fonts and website templates and much more!
But if you’re unsure about the types of images you should be using, then checkout websites like http://undraw.co that offer an amazing selection of free illustrations that are free to use. Sometimes these can be more suitable than images.
3-Having a complicated navigation
We see this very often in corporate websites.
They tend to cram a lot of information on their website, which makes it seem like they don’t really care about their visitor’s needs
If your average user is looking for a way to contact you, then they are most probably not interested in reading your vision or mission statements.
What you should do instead is hire a professional copywriter
A copywriter can simplify and make your text readable for the average user, they can also highlight the most important aspects of your business.
4-Not being mobile friendly
It’s the year 2020 Your website needs to be mobile first!
You cannot design websites and not care about mobile users anymore. Most of us spend most of our day browsing on our mobile devices.
When a client clicks a link to your website, and they see an image that doesn’t fit properly, text that is hard to read they’re not going to stay for long.
This can cost you valuable leads and the solution is to always be mobile optimized that also means that your website needs to be very fast on mobile devices because most people on their mobile phones have a much shorter attention span than desktop users, or are browsing on a mobile network that is not very reliable.
5-Heavy loading images and intros
We see this trend a lot nowadays, a nice background video on almost every website’s homepage.
While this can please the eyes and reflect a professional design, sometime it comes at a heavy cost.
If your website is taking more than a split second to load, you need to go back to the drawing board.
You’re website’s bounce rate is high, this can often mean that your website is taking far too long to load.
If you think that this background video is adding to your business and it’s not really causing a lot of bandwidth usage and it’s not really slowing down your website and by all means go for it but if that video is really causing you a lot of headaches and it’s slowing down your website then you should get rid of it completely because we’re not user and go to your website and it loads in more than three seconds then you do user will leave your website and go to competitors
In conclusion web design looks very easy on the surface, however to build a compelling and business grade system a lot of effort must be spent in making sure your efforts are not wasted over silly mistakes!
