Avoid These Web Design Sins

May 20,2016

Is your website driving away customers? If you're committing these site development sins, it could be costing you more than you know.

Copying your competition. Always check out what your competition is doing, but don't be a copycat. If you look too much like other businesses, customers could have trouble telling you apart. Review what others are doing, but speak to your own customers and use your own institutional knowledge to determine what is important to them.

Ignoring your audience's needs.Try getting baby boomers to read eight-point type and they may get frustrated.Before you build your site you should know your audience's needs and their preference.Tiny or hard-to-read typefaces or harsh colors may look great from a design standpoint, but if you're not designing for the people who buy from you, you could be losing their business, Graceffa says.

Refusing to get help. Don't let your pride or fear of spending earn you a spot on WebPagesThatSuck.com. If web design is not your strong suit and you need more than what a web design template can provide, seek professional help. Check your local business associations and look online for sites you like. Many have links at the bottom to their designers' sites, so you can find a designer whose work you already like.

Being cluttered. Your site can't be all things to all people, you need to select about the content you decide to put on the site and organize it in a clean and logical manner. A lot of people try to put too much, especially on their home pages, and cram more down their customers' throats.

Staying static. Your website is never done, he says. Keep finding ways to engage your customers, add content and make your site fresh. This will attract more customer visit to your website and may also help in your web rankings, he says. If you're promoting a specific product or service or have a special promotion going on, it's a good idea to use landing pages that support e-mail and social networking outreach efforts.

Making things difficult. The route from first click to sale has to be easy. Ungvarsky says it's important to think like customers and prospects when evaluating the design of a site. One of his pet peeves: Having to set up an account before checking out. Let customers buy from you on their terms, he says.