In the online space, your website defines who you are as a brand and a business.

Think of it as the cover of a magazine or book. It is the face of your business and you are very likely to be judged by how your homepage looks, just like books are.

Your website design needs to be functional, respectable and elegant if you are wanting to be seen in a positive light by the online users who visit and hopefully navigate the ‘artwork’ that you have spent hours and hours creating.

To help you in achieving this, we have compiled a list of 5 common mistakes of web designers that, more often than not, make your website obsolete.

Low-Resolution Images

Have you ever taken a bunch of photos that you look at afterwards, noticing every pixel on the picture like it’s a grain of sand? I mean, it’s infuriating.

Now imagine surfing the web and coming across a piece of writing that you find so interesting that you click on the link it has supplied you with that takes you back to the website it came from. Once the site has loaded, the images in the background are all blurry and look like little grains of sand all over your screen.

Are you going to stay on that site much longer?  Didn’t think so.

This applies to everyone else, and it’s therefore very important for you to make sure that the images you are uploading onto your website are of great quality and have a high resolution. It’s a mistake that will prove to be all too costly for your website.

Unclear Calls-To-Action

Calls-To-Action are pieces of content intended to persuade users of your website to perform specific acts – whether it be filling out a form, making a booking, or purchasing a product.

We understand that the design of your website is important for attracting users to stay on the site, but they are not there for visual satisfaction. They are designed and created to serve a purpose, to help meet your business objectives.

To be effective, they need to be simple, visible, and give a very clear understanding of what you want users to do on your website.

On-Site Adverts

On-Site adverts occur when you are paid to have other websites run their ads on your website. There can be benefits to this as they will help pay for the maintenance of your website and it can help with your site being praised for showing good content.

On the other hand, you can’t control what adverts are displayed, and if they are pop-ups, banner ads situated between paragraphs on your website pages or displayed either at the top or bottom of your pages, they become very annoying. Resulting in users of your website leaving and surfing for other websites to supply them with what they are looking for.

Clutter

Have you ever heard of the saying ‘less is more’?

It is one of the most important sayings to follow when designing a website.

Why?

Too much clutter on your website pages can result in a few things:

• Slow site speed.
• Drop in Google ranking.
• Website users becoming distracted.
• Website users not being able to keep up with everything going on and leaving the site.
• Users struggle to find necessary information amongst everything going on.

These consequences all affect your website negatively, and therefore have a negative impact on your business.

Be smart. Keep it simple.

Broken Links

Have you ever clicked on a link that takes you to a blank page? Or to a page with an “error, 404 not found”? We know, it’s irritating, especially because you would have only clicked the link because it interested you.

So, ask yourself. Have you double-checked all the links that are on your site? If not, you need to.

Why? If users get an error message from one link, there’s a very small chance they are going to try another link on your site.

To do so, create a Google Search Console account. Once completed, it will list any website links on your website that are not working.

Now that you know what to look out for, go and analyse your website, all of it.

If you are wanting some help, we have a team of expert web designers who will fix your errors, re-design your website to optimise it fully, and maintain in to be in pristine condition all the time. Book a call now, listen to what we have to offer you.