What are some of the most common web design mistakes to avoid?

Date: 07/10/2024

Many start-up businesses and entrepreneurs may have had a website designed before. So, it’s too simple to hand all the work over to the web designers. Yet, when your website is back up and running and it’s been live for three months, you might start noticing functionality you wish you had incorporated into the design.

Choosing the right CMS for your business is crucial. For instance, a high bounce rate on Google Analytics could indicate that you’ve picked the wrong one, affecting your business’s performance.

The web design team at W&P has many years of experience designing brilliant websites. We, therefore, know what works and what doesn’t regarding web design. So, we thought we would write a quick article explaining some shared web design problems many businesses encounter.

Just as you wouldn’t attempt to build a wall and extension on your house, you should entrust your website design to a professional. This is why web designers are in high demand for their services. When a business needs a professional, high-quality website, it needs a highly skilled web designer. At W&P, we offer web design and SEO services to meet your needs.

So what are some of the more common web design mistakes?

We would say that the most common mistake a business makes is purchasing an overly simplistic website. One that is too basic doesn’t fully detail all of the business’s services. Therefore, improving the business’s organic search engine optimisation is tricky when each leading service is set out on its page.

So, the website often lacks clarity regarding the services the business offers. And shoppers today don’t wait around to look for a service. They leave that company’s website if they can’t find the exemplary service they want to purchase quickly. This causes a higher bounce rate, damaging the business’s search engine optimisation.

Main menu design

Therefore, the main menu must be designed to get the shopper to the right page quickly. Plus, you also need every service on its page. Let’s say you have a one-page website. You are a family solicitor, for example. However, if customers cannot quickly read that you offer collaborative law, they may leave the website.

However, you can design the website well so that collaborative law has its page. The main navigation should also be well-designed so shoppers can quickly spot the page they want.

What are your main competitors doing?

So, if your main competitors are at the top of Google and those businesses are thriving, what are they doing right regarding their website design?

For example, if you sell products, they make a presenter dedicated to explaining each product’s benefits. Do they have well-written, bullet-point product descriptions?

Do they have a chatbot that’s good at answering customer questions?

You should consider incorporating similar functionality; for example, if your main competitor has a chatbot, your business may require this.
For example, if your main competitor has many YouTube videos with staff explaining how to use a product, you may sell kitchen tiles. Many videos describing how to tile a wall will be helpful to the customer.

From a web design perspective, adding this to a website will cost more. Yet, the most successful businesses in your business sector might have achieved this because they have gone the extra mile to offer helpful advice to customers.

Ever since the Google E-EAT update and Google Helpful content update, it’s more important than ever to write and publish work that your customers will find very helpful. This increases time on site and reduces bounce rate, which is good for your business in terms of your sales being more likely to improve.

Most definitely purchase a designer to design brand guidelines.

So, many businesses, let’s say a brand new start-up company, might be moving to headquarters, let’s say, in Cardiff Bay. They may call a local web designer and start designing a website.

Now, for some businesses, this is all good, yet it’s best to spend some time creating a set of brand guidelines for some other companies. This is to create a company logo, choose a font, and, for example, choose a colour scheme for the business. This ensures that the company branding is consistent, from the company’s business cards to the branding on the company vehicles to how the website looks.

Poor mobile design

Many web design agencies sometimes design websites that look good on desktops. For example, the website looks fantastic on your MacBook Pro, and you’re pleased with the design.

However, the mobile design of the same website might be super basic and not say much about what your business offers.

Now, most web design agencies agree that for most businesses, whether they specialise in catering for weddings or construction business, roughly speaking, over 50% of the visitors, that’s organic visitors via Google.co.uk, often come from a mobile device, primarily smartphones.

So, if your business doesn’t have a well-designed responsive website, then this could mean that many shoppers may find your mobile website hard to use. They may find that it doesn’t answer a question they may have had, so they leave the website.

Therefore, the bounce rate is high, and the dwell time is low, which is terrible for your business’s search engine optimisation. That’s because Google’s algorithms will deem your company website offers a poor UX or user experience.

So, what are some common mistakes that web designers and businesses make when designing the mobile version of their website?

Text

Sometimes, the text is too difficult to read, and some fonts don’t work on some browsers. So, you must pick a font that works across different browsers.

It doesn’t scale to match the screen size.

Some websites do not scale to the size of a smartphone or tablet, meaning shoppers often go to another website, increasing the bounce rate.

Websites navigation

Avoid burger menus

So, let’s say your website has a well-designed homepage. Let’s say you sell hypercars, and the homepage instantly communicates that this is what your business sells, using Lamborghinis, for example.

But let’s say your web design agency designs a budget menu for your car dealership. It’s a menu with three small lines in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Yet, seeing the burger menu might be challenging when the website loads on a smartphone.

Many shoppers might not even get past the homepage because the main menu is so difficult to use.

Sure, a burger menu makes the home page look minimalistic, yet if this comes at the cost of the website’s simplicity, then you might end up with a lot of frustrated shoppers who can’t get onto the page they want.

This will, therefore, increase the bounce rate.

Is your company website a bit sluggish?

If your company website is a bit slow, especially on mobile, this can hamper your company’s SEO efforts and mean that you may also miss out on customers. Many incredibly cheap websites often have super-slow hosting, which will damage your business’s organic SEO.

A balanced approach

So, often, businesses want the full-hog, with autoloading videos at the top of the homepage, high-resolution images of the company staff, premises, and products, and chatbots instantly loading. All of this drains the speed of the company website.

If you have high-speed, lightning-quick hosting that instantly loads your company website, then that’s no problem. Why not ask your web designers to design the website how you want it?

Yet, ultra-fast hosting doesn’t often come cheap. Servers are expensive, so you usually have to hire a hosting company. Moreover, different website hosting companies offer various hosting speeds.

Some hosting companies offer high-speed hosting, yet you often must pay more. So, a common mistake is businesses choosing a hosting company that offers sluggish, slow hosting. This means you have many frustrated shoppers who are impatient and won’t wait long, resulting in a high bounce rate.

Pop-ups can be annoying.

So, just as when you walk into a car dealership , and you have a pushy salesperson, this can put you off buying from that car dealership,

right?

So, you will likely turn on your heels and go elsewhere, right?

Well, this is the same with a website, where the web developer has designed it so that on every page that loads, a pop-up loads to perhaps ask the customer to sign up for a newsletter.

This can get annoying for the customer, who may not want to hand over their e-mail address, for their e-mail inbox to be rammed with spam.

Some businesses insist that web designers add pop-up messages and screens, yet often, this can annoy the customer, causing a bad user experience. This can mean that you lose that customer, and yes, again, the bounce rate may increase sharply.

Do you want a DIY website?

So sure, DIY websites are often offered as cheap as chips.

Yet here’s the thing: When starting a business, we understand that you will likely be cash-strapped.

So, the temptation is to buy things on the cheap.

Cheap stationery—well, why not, a pen—but a cheap website—well, that’s a false economy.

The reason we say that is that when you sit down, make a cup of tea, and think about how customers are going to find your business, most of the time, a business is either heavily reliant on or solely reliant on its company website to drum up business.

Now, if you spend, let’s say, thousands of Google Adwords to help you gain more sales, but you send customers to a poorly designed website, you’re unlikely to get many sales.

Sure, Google Adwords is brilliant at gaining more customers for businesses; with the flip of a switch, your Google PPC campaign can be live.
Yet, if your website is rubbish, people will not stay around for long. It’s a bit like opening a restaurant, spending a fortune on advertising for the build-up to the opening night, only to purchase cheap and nasty ingredients, which means your customers don’t return.

And this is the same for website design; you might be forking out dough on the following:

• Google Adwords
• SEO Consultant
• Social media advertising

But what’s the blooming point if the website is rubbish and poorly designed?

Hire a web designer or a large web design agency that can design a website that cuts the mustard.

Why is your web design company always so busy?

So, it’s true that our web designers are like busy bees. One hour, they’re writing PHP to design a main menu, and the next, they could create a brochure website for a top solicitor’s practice.

We are always busy because we design top-quality websites at some of the best prices you will find.

So, here’s why so many companies choose W&P:

• We design the mobile version of the website for free
• We offer one year of free hosting
• We specialise in designing and building WordPress websites.

Are you spending money advertising your company on Google, Instagram, or Facebook?

Well, this is an excellent way of getting more shoppers on your website—yet if you’re spending money on digital marketing, you need an impressive, well-built website.

This is where we can come in. Our hardworking and diligent web developers can often design most of our brochure websites in less than three weeks from start to finish. (That’s as long as the web developers are given copious amounts of coffee!).

We can offer you the complete package.

So many businesses, from start-ups to well-known established brands, come to W&P because we offer the full range of digital marketing services.

We have SEO consultants who know everything about optimising your business’s on-page and off-page search engine optimisation.
Then, we can also design a brilliant, well-designed, impressive WordPress website for your business.

So, why not give us a ring so we can start building a brand new website for your company?