Today, almost every business has a website. A website is very important to a business as it is like a 24/7 salesman. If you design a good site and work on its conversion rate, it can bring you targeted leads or sales for as long as you are in business. Other than looking good, there are other elements that a good website must have.
However, when you look at most of the websites today, they are not user-friendly and marketable. In this article, let me share with you 8 website design mistakes that you must avoid if you want to create a good website:
1. Poor navigation. Do not let your visitors figure out how to browse your web pages. You may find it easy to navigate through your site but it may not be the case for first-time visitors. Therefore, make sure you display the navigation bar prominently on all pages and use common naming conventions for the links.
2. Building a website with flash or frames. A website that is built entirely on flash or frames is not search engine friendly and this may cost you valuable traffic. Also, visitors will have trouble bookmarking individual pages too because there is no unique URL to identify every page.
3. Not enough information on the home page. The home page is the most important page of your website. You must present the most important information on the home page so that first time visitors can understand what you are offering right away.
4. Too many graphics and animations. Graphics and animations slow down the loading time of your site and people have very low tolerance nowadays. When they feel that your site loads very slow, they will leave and visit another site.
5. Using horizontal scroll bar. People are not used to seeing horizontal scroll bar on their browsers. So do not use it.
6. Pages not connected to the home page. With search engines, it is common for people to enter your site through other pages instead of your home page. So a good practice will be to include a link back to the home page on other sub pages so that they can find out what your site is really about.
7. Not testing the design on various browser platforms. The design may look good on Firefox but not on Google Chrome. So make sure that you test the design on various browser platforms before making it live.
8. Look and feel of the web pages is not standardized. You should standardize your link color, font size and other areas to make your site look professional.
Hope that with this article, you will not make these web design mistakes in the future.
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing web design singapore services.
Check out more web design singapore portfolio here.
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