Every business owner knows that they need an amazing website, but a lot of them don’t know how to make that happen. It’s true that the vast majority of consumers will look for businesses online when they are in the market for products or services, so your website is like the modern equivalent of a shopfront. It’s your chance to give people a sense of what your business is about and what you can offer them.
Much like somebody walking down the street and looking at the shops they pass, potential customers are only going to look at your website for a few seconds before deciding whether they want to explore further and browse your products or just move on. That’s why the user experience on your website is so important. Consumers need to be able to navigate the site quickly and easily. Unfortunately, a lot of business websites are very poorly designed and the user experience suffers.
If you’re designing your business website, be sure to avoid these common mistakes that ruin the user experience.
Doing The Design Themselves
Most business owners know that free website builders aren’t that great and they should pay a professional to build the website for you. But they often make the mistake of thinking that they can come up with the design themselves and give that to a web design agency to create the actual site.
The problem is unless you know a lot about graphic design, it’s likely you’re not going to get it right. You need to make sure that the layout is pleasing to the eye but also easy to navigate, the color scheme needs to work properly and correlate to your branding, and the font that you use needs to be easy to read and stylish. Those tasks aren’t as simple as they sound and if you want to get great website design, you’re going to need to hire a graphic designer or web designer to do it for you. Even though it’s an extra expense, hiring an expert and working with them on the design is the only way that you’re going to come up with something that really works and provides sales for your business in the long run.
Not Testing Properly
If your website goes live without being tested properly, it’s likely that it will be filled with bugs and broken features that may ruin the user experience. If a website is half finished and frustrating to use, people won’t stick around for long. The first thing you need to do is to test an offline version of the site yourself to see if you can pick up any problems.
To do this, you need to know how to edit Mac’s hosts files and redirect the web address to an offline version of the site so you can test it before it goes live. Have a general browse, make sure that all of the links and videos are working, and check the spelling and grammar. Once you’ve tested it yourself, you should pay a website testing company to check the site as well as they may pick up on things that you’ve missed.
Too Many Pop-Ups
Pop-ups can be an effective way of advertising deals and offers that you may have running or by getting more people to sign up to your email list, but it’s important that you don’t go overboard. Pop-ups quickly become an annoyance and if a user has to close down multiple pop-ups before they can actually see the website. One or maybe two at a push won’t be too off-putting, but any more than that and people are likely to leave the site.
If you’re making these basic mistakes on your website, you can seriously affect the user experience and that will have a knock-on effect on your sales. Use these tips as a baseline for what not to do in your website design process. Comment below your favorite web design tips!