Web Design Mistakes – The Top Five

Using Flash on your homepage is just about the biggest mistake you can make in web design. Although Flash sites are often very sexy and have very good graphics, you have to consider what your visitors are searching for. All your visitors are looking for is how your products or services can benefit them and having a sexy Flash site will not sway them towards using you in fact quite the opposite.


Not all of your visitors will have mega broadband connections and what will appear quickly to some will take an age for others and will more than likely have them clicking the back button through frustration. People expect instant responses these days and most web sites provide this so why would you want to be any different? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.


The second mistake is trying to make your website look like a catalog with hundreds of links to different products on the front page and subsequent pages. People do this because they fear that they will miss out on that sale if they don’t display everything prominently. The total opposite of this is true.


Research on Internet marketing has proven that having too many links to offers on a page will lead the visitor to purchase nothing in most cases. This has been linked with information overload which you want to avoid at all costs. A better solution is to create categories for your products and a good search facility so that your visitors can find what they are looking for.


The next big mistake is not to have your site optimized for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Many will tell you that your message to your visitors is much more important than worrying about the search engines. It is true that your visitors should be your priority, but it is also fairly easy to optimize your content for the search engines as well.


The smart thing to do is to see what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for plumbers in London. As an example we will choose the term “Plumber in London" as the keywords most will be using. It’s then just a simple matter of optimizing your site for this search term. You need these keywords to appear a few times in your site and in the description and title of the web page. That way Google and the others will understand that your company is a plumber in London.


A very common mistake, and number four in this article, is loading your site with too many pictures. Lots of pictures will slow down your site and more importantly will provide a distraction to your visitors so they may end up leaving without taking the action that you want. Google are now penalizing web sites with slow load times. Online research companies have found that a web site has around seven seconds to satisfy its readers. If your site takes longer than that to load they will hit the back button faster than you can say “too slow".


Getting inexperienced people to create your site and its content is the fifth mistake. The point of having a web site is to get your visitors to take action such as buying your product or service, joining your email list or picking up the phone and calling you. Just let your web designer do what they are good at which is the design work while you or a hired copywriter produce the written content.