Monday, April 18, 2011

Web Design Mistakes – The Top Five

Using Flash on your homepage is just about the biggest mistake you can make in web design. Your visitors will not be that impressed with your beautiful Flash site so don’t waste your time and money with this. 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.


Even though high speed connections are quite common, not everyone has them and by adding Flash you will make your site slow to load and risk a lot of visitors going elsewhere. Internet surfers are used to instant answers and don’t appreciate delays so why make them wait? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.


Making your website look like a catalog with links everywhere to everything that you offer is the second mistake to avoid. This is the “show them all you’ve got scenario" where website owners believe that if they display all of their offers they will make more sales. 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. Categorizing your site so that it is easy for your visitors to find what you have to offer is a far better solution.


Creating a site that the top search engines Yahoo, Bing and Google can’t find is the third biggest mistake that you can make with web design. Many will tell you that your message to your visitors is much more important than worrying about the search engines. While there is truth in this, it is quite easy to write for your visitors and optimize for the search engines at the same time.


If you are offering plumbing services in London then you need to think about what people looking for your service will type into the search engines. Assume that most people are typing in “Plumber In London". Well the web site needs to be optimized for this 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. If you have too many graphics it will distract your visitors from your sales message and also increase the load time of your page on the Internet. 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. Having too many images could mean that your site takes longer than seven seconds to load and your visitors will be hitting the back button in their droves.


Many people trust their web design to marketing novices who have no idea how to create compelling content which is the final mistake to make. There is no point in producing a fancy looking web site that has a poor message and does not encourage your visitors to contact you, join your email marketing list or buy your products or services. 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.

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