You’ve got an inbound marketing strategy, and plans for content, but you may be making web design mistakes that are hurting your brand— and your business.
We’ve put together a cheat sheet with most common mistakes we’ve seen, why they’re counterproductive, and what you can do to make things right. Following these guidelines, your site will be working with your marketing strategy, not against it.
Web Design Cheat Sheet
Web Design Mistakes |
Why? |
Make it Right! |
| Entrance/Splash Pages | Irrelevant, Don’t Add Value | Keep a standard home/landing page, and use modal or pop-ups to communicate specific/unique messages along the way. |
| Style Conflicts (Different fonts, color schemes, design and layout throughout your site) | Confusing, Detracts from the overall strength of your brand | Get your marketing/design teams to create a brand book/style guide— it will keep things cohesive and consistent. |
| Inconsistent/Unclear Navigation | May prevent users from finding products, services | Create a layout where they can find what they need in 1-2 clicks, don’t overwhelm them with buttons, tabs, and sidebars. |
| Your logo isn’t interactive. | People may think your site is broken when they click on the logo, but aren’t redirected to your site. | Put an <img> tag between the opening <a> tag and the closing </a> tag to make it active/clickable. |
| Too many bells and whistles | If it takes to long to load your site, people won’t stay on it. | Make sure you have images and video, but not too many. Test your loading time across devices (mobile, computer, and tablet). |
| Using images/graphics for text | A search engine can’t read it (e.g. bad for SEO). | Don’t do it— ever! |
| Fake photos | Inauthentic, bad for your brand | Take some high-quality images of your business, product, and staff. Get rid of those cheesy stock photos once and for all. |
Web Design Mistakes |
Why? |
Make it Right! |
| Way too much stuff: graphics, images, text, etc. | Dilutes the emphasis of your copy/content | Don’t be afraid of leaving some white space and placing some great copy/striking images front and center! |
| Automated Sounds/Background Music | Impacts loading time, annoys visitors | Don’t do it. If you must have something automated, try a video that plays when they land on your homepage. Just make sure it’s not on a never-ending loop. |
| Interstitials (Pages that appear briefly between a user’s click, and the intended landing page.) | Nobody likes to be kept waiting too long— and we all hate pop-ups! | Keep it to one or two interstitials max—like loading pages for highly-anticipated content— but be very strategic and intentional with their placement. |
| Incompatibility | Different users have different browsers, and you want them all to use your site, right? | Invest in—and use—a cross-browser compatibility testing tool. |
| Your site is only computer-friendly. | Mobile searching and mobile-web are ruling e-commerce these days. It would be crazy to ignore those lead pools. | Work with a marketing team/strategy that knows how to optimize your inbound content across devices. |
Check out our article on How You Should Approach Your Web Design Strategy.
Which of these web design mistakes do you need to fix right now? And who can you trust to do it right?
