Author: W&P
Subject: Web Design

Introduction

So, many businesses, especially start-up companies that are cash-strapped, might call around various local web designers for quotes. Yet they often find that even freelancers now often want upwards of 2k to design a brochure website.

Now, when a business is writing a business plan, it often budgets a lot less for the website, thinking that it can be built for a fraction of that price.

However, websites can be built cheaply, but do they serve their intended purpose, which is to increase sales?

Often, a DIY job website will have weak SEO and sometimes be very slow to load. The mobile version of the website is also often not considered, so the point we are trying to make is that the design often ends up being very weak.

Yet, if you are going to try building your own company website, we thought we would put together a handy guide.

I hope you will not fall into the trap that so many other businesses do when designing their first company website.
Without further ado, let’s examine some of the common mistakes that some businesses make when designing their first company website.

Lack of mobile optimisation

Walk practically anywhere today, and everybody is glued to their smartphones. This means that more and more shoppers buy goods and services from smartphones.

This means that the company website needs to work really well on smartphones. Now smartphones and tablets come in a huge range of different screen sizes. For example, some Samsung Galaxy smartphones have mini iPhones with giant screens.

So, the website needs to work well on desktops, such as your Apple MacBook Pro, smartphones, and tablets.

So, a common mistake many businesses make, especially small businesses designing their first company website, is that they don’t carefully consider how the mobile version of the website will look and don’t prioritise making it super simple to use.

Therefore, one of two things happens: either there’s no mobile version of the website, or it’s so poorly designed that when the business logs into its Google Analytics account, it will see that the website has an extremely high bounce rate. That’s because the mobile version of the website could offer a poor user experience, so the bounce rate will be high. This means that the business could be missing out on a lot of sales.

Poor navigation

A website’s navigation should be super simple to quickly take a customer from the homepage to the right product or service page. If the main menu is wholly cluttered and doesn’t even work on some smartphones, then again, the bounce rate will be very high.

So, as a hugely experienced web design agency, our best advice is to keep the website’s navigation simple and make it uncluttered and straightforward. So that you are taking the shopper from the homepage, through to the right product page, using just a few clicks.

Don’t add pop-ups

Some businesses think adding pop-ups to the page is an excellent way to put a CTA or call to action in front of the customer.
Let’s say you run a law practice and add pop-ups saying, “Fill your details in now, and we will call you back.” This is fine, but when you land on the website, which is the first box on the homepage, it can be unpleasant for a shopper.

Plus, every page they then subsequently go on, they may see the same pop-up message. What ends up happening is that this might annoy the shopper, who may then quickly decide to leave the company website. Google will know that a shopper is not spending very long at all on that business website, which means that the website has a low dwell time. This means that the business might start to move down Google’s ranks because it has a low dwell time.

So, if a company website is outdated, for example, you might add an award that the business achieved in 2017, yet the company website is not updated with newer awards. This can make the company website look outdated.

This is another reason you may want to hire a marketing agency like us instead. Not just to design a really impressive WordPress website or, let’s say, a Drupal website, but to work with the marketing company on a monthly basis to improve search engine optimisation. Then, you may want to make web design edits more often to keep the website updated.

Stock images

So, many companies make the common mistake of using stock images, which don’t sell the products or services that the business sells well.

What do we mean by that?

Well, let’s say that you run a construction company here in Wales. You hire a local web designer who uses stock photos of diggers, construction staff, and the construction of a building. Yet anybody who’s worked in the U.K. construction industry often can immediately see that the construction work has taken place in America and not here in the U.K.—how would they know that?

Well, the health and safety equipment, such as high-viz vests, often look different, as do the helmets and the overhead power lines pictured in the picture.

So, a customer, somebody looking for a local construction business, will know that those photos haven’t been taken in the U.K. and are stock photos. So, we recommend that when hiring a web developer, either pick high-quality stock photos, which you often have to buy or pay a local photography company for the day to get high-quality, high-resolution pictures for your company.

Stock photos often look low-quality if it’s clear to the shopper that they weren’t taken in the U.K.

Come to the web design experts in Cardiff:

Here the services that our company can offer:

WordPress web designers

We have been designing WordPress websites for diverse companies in the U.K.

SEO

We can offer both organic and local SEO services.

Would you like a free quote?

If you’re opening a dental practice here in Cardiff or thinking about starting a plumbing business, whatever type of company you plan on starting, why not give us a ring? We can design and build CMS websites, starting from just £950.00