You want your website to be as easy to navigate and as beautiful as possible when you’re coding it. Web design firms keeps your users on a page without frustrating or confusing them. But all too often, web designers make easily avoidable mistakes that have negative impacts on their site and reader engagement.
Problems in web design can make it hard for your audience to find the services and products you offer. What’s worse, it can make it so they don’t want to revisit your website in the future, because it’s too confusing or unintuitive to use. Fortunately, most common mistakes in web design can be avoided with some basic knowledge and tips
We’ve put together the top five web design mistakes that you’re probably making when building out your website. Not only that, we’ve provided easy steps to follow to avoid these mistakes and improve your long-term web design. Read on to discover how to make your web design the best it can be for your users.
Your Content Organization Doesn't Make Sense
A reader should flow easily from page to page when they’re browsing your site. It should make sense to them how they got to where they did, and where the content they’re engaging with will logically flow next. Unfortunately, a lot of web design suffers from an illogical content organization.
You want your users to feel comfortable, not overwhelmed, when they’re looking at your groups of content. Ideally, you’ll want to design the blocks of content, like text or images, in a way that gives them room to breathe on a page. A lot of cloistered content is jarring for readers and makes the content flow messier.
Using padding and borders can make it easier for you to separate pieces of your content. Try to use color to enhance the way your content is broken up so that readers understand the flow of your content. Visual aid like this is one of the easiest and most effective web design elements to use to improve your content organization.
There's Too Much Stuff Going On
Too much stuff happening on a webpage is even more jarring than bad content flow. If there’s simply too much content on your website, especially if it’s on your home landing page, users are going to simply up and leave after getting overwhelmed. You need to carefully pick and choose what content goes where so that you don’t have a single page with ninety-five percent of your content.
Typically, web designers put too much content on a page because they want to grab readers’ interest, fast. The problem with this is, if your reader can’t even figure out what your services or products are because of too much content, they’re going to leave quickly. Decide what the most important pieces of information are to include on your home page, and then move around the rest of your content accordingly.
Another problem with too much content is that your loading times suffer. Plus, the more dynamic content you have (scripts running on the front-end, for example), the longer it’ll take to load your pages. Carefully consider what web elements should go where to avoid slowing your loading times.
Your CTAs Are Nowhere (Seemingly) To Be Found
The call to action, or CTA, is your customers’ gateway to your products and services. Without a good CTA, it’s nearly impossible to lead your audience toward making a purchase. So, as you might have guessed, improper (or lack of!) CTA placement can be a death knell for your website design.
Part of good CTA design is making it obvious for readers what the call to action actually is. This can be in any form you want, but the bottom line is that your call to action needs to be crystal clear about what it’s asking of your readers.
Of course, you also want to make sure your CTA isn’t bugging your readers too much. You should try to straddle the fine line between being attractive and engaging, without coming across as annoying and overbearing. The last thing you want to do is drive away your audience with the very thing that you want them to check out!
You're Not Using Whitespace Correctly
In order for your content to work as well as you want it to, you’ll need to have good use of whitespace. Basically, you need to thoughtfully curate your absence of content, so that you can do an even better job of highlighting the content you’re including. That’s why using whitespace effectively is so important to good web design.
When you’re using whitespace as part of web design, try to consider how it will move your reader’s eye to blocks of texts or images you want them to notice. You can use whitespace as a visual element to help make your content look and feel less crowded. Not using any whitespace, or using too much of it, is a common pitfall of web design.
The most important thing to keep in mind when using whitespace as a visual element is how it breaks up your content. Try to approach the way you move your content flow using whitespace, and consider how you’d feel about it as a reader.
Your Site is Hard to Navigate
Last but certainly not least is your site’s navigability. Issues with your navigation are some of the biggest culprits when it comes to bed web design. If your audience can’t get around your website, they are simply going to leave as soon as they got there.
A good UX/UI team will be able to make solid recommendations as to where things like your navigation menu should be placed on your website. Perhaps your users want to find a product of yours, but they have no idea how to search for it — you need to address these navigability issues in order to have as much user engagement as possible.
The navigation components of your site should stand out and be immediately noticeable to your readers. Emphasize to them how you want them to navigate your pages and what content is available for them to explore. Good navigation will encourage your readers to not only stay on your site longer, but it will also increase the chances that they will make a purchase.
