Building a website is a crucial part of any business strategy. You need information online to help people find you, understand you, and ultimately spend their money with you. Business websites – or any website, for that matter – need to be clear, concise, and clean. Cluttered, jumbled-up websites leave customers and clients confused, or drive people away from your business. You want a beautiful, easy to navigate the site. For that to happen, you should avoid these common mistakes…
Not Using A Professional…
Hear us out on this one. Though there are many options for self-building a website, sometimes for the inexperienced designer, the best thing to do is hire some professionals in your area. Make sure you search for a web design agency in Surrey, or wherever you are based, and go meet with them. Tell them what your business is about, what you need people to get from your site, and share with them any logos or imagery you have for your business.
The professionals will then get to work and create a bespoke designed website for you that oozes class. Experienced designers will be able to create a website of a specific theme in a short amount of time. It can be as simple or as complex as you like, plus they’ll even be able to add logo design and integrate sales, social media feeds, and more. They’ll also be able to show you examples of previous work to give you a flavour of what your site may look like.
… Or Pro Design Software
If you don’t want to work with professional designers, you’ll need to buy some professional tools. Many online website builders are free but come covered in adverts and banners and other unprofessional-looking bits. They may also not allow for custom URLs, mailing list sign-ups, or other crucial marketing tool integrations. For these reasons, any web building sites should be premium ones. This costs money, yes, but it will make your business and website look like they were made by the pros.
Too Much Information!
A really common mistake people make, especially when building websites for themselves, is cramming far too much info into one page. No one likes looking at huge blocks of text that’s hard to read or take in. Your homepage doesn’t need to have every single thing about your business. Many homepages are sleek and simply link to other pages. A barrage of information at first glance does not draw people in. A classy logo with some neat links and a few boxes of text look a lot nicer.
Allowing Pop-Ups
People don’t like pop-up adverts. Even if they relate to your site, or are part of your site, they bring out bad reactions in people. After all, they didn’t ask for all these extra windows to appear! This, again, often comes with cheaper websites or sites hosted through free hosting companies. Avoiding or blocking pop-ups is something that you can do with a more premium or professional web service. The last thing you or your business wants is to be annoying people every time they land on your page.
Poor Structure / Broken Links
Nothing’s more annoying than pop-ups. Apart from maybe when something says “click here” and nothing happens. Or, maybe clicking a link and being sent to a broken landing page. Before your website goes live, test it twice and then test it again. Make sure every link navigates to the right place. Make sure every image is embedded properly. Just look out for these simple errors. Again, they’ll make your business and page look much less professional, which is not what you want.
Long Pages & Endless Scrolling
Finally, another tip to help keep people interested is to not make your pages too long. If you have something to sell, great, do it in one to two pages worth of scroll. Don’t make me scroll through an essay and a half before even reaching images or call to actions. People get bored easily on the internet. There’s too much great content out there for yours to be slow or boring, long or tiring. Keep it snappy, keep it interesting, and keep it light. Don’t make your potential clients bored before even asking them to spend money!
We hope you can take these top tips forward with you and start to plan, co-design, or build your website. Whichever route you choose, make sure to look out for sloppy errors and broken pages, keep it neat and tidy, and make sure it’s interesting. You’ll have a fully functioning and successful site in no time.
