According to a study out of Stanford, 75% of Internet users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on its website design. In fact, 46% of people claim that a website’s appearance is their number one criterion for determining the legitimacy of a company.
What does your website say about your business? If you have made any of the following mistakes in your site’s design, you could be conveying the wrong message and pushing away a significant portion of your intended audience.
Three Most Common Web Design Mistakes
Illegible Text
You put a lot of time and effort into writing quality content for your website, but your design makes it nearly impossible to read the text. Here are a few things that make your text hard to decipher: poor contrast between the background and the text color, tiny font size, multiple fonts that confuse and overwhelm the readers, or cramming too much text on a single page. Design your website around your content and avoid these major text mistakes. Your website should be neat, uncomplicated, and legible.
Inconsistent Style
Before you even begin to design a website, you need to define your style. If you don’t, you may be stuck with a website that is suffering a major identity crisis or split-personality disorder. Have you ever seen a four-year-old whose parents let her dress herself? It’s style anarchy, and it won’t suit your website or help your business in any way. Your brand identity must match your message, and your website must reflect that. When it comes to web development, consistency is key.
Difficult to Navigate
Web design is about more than aesthetics. Functionality and the user experience are incredibly important to web development. If your buttons don’t make sense, your links are scattered or broken, or users cannot find your navigation menu, you won’t be able to hold consumer attention for more than a minute or two. As many as 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load, and you can bet they will be out of there just as quickly if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for. To avoid leading your visitors into the depths of a virtual maze, devote some time to planning the structure of your website early on.
These are just three of many mistakes business owners make when they attempt to design their own websites. To avoid these risks altogether, consider hiring a reputable website design company that can provide custom web development. You will find that when you outsource your website solutions, your business will receive more traffic, increasing your clientele and boosting business.
