With an upsurge in mobile browsing and introduction of innovative design features like parallax scrolling, the internet has witnessed innumerable sites receive facelifts over the years. It has also resulted in lots of poor website design solutions that prevent customers from connecting with businesses and brands. From poor navigation to unattractive homepages, and numerous errors, there are plenty of flaws that a website can improve on.
So, if you too are experiencing issues related to an average site design, then this post will help you. Here we list the most common design and best website design flaws that can hurt your site’s overall performance and engagement.
1. Failing to Create a Responsive Design
Presently, more than 50% of modern searches are conducted on smartphones, gadgets, and tablets. Having a site design that can display properly the content and images on such devices is of paramount importance for brands and businesses.
But out of millions of websites on the internet, very few have been designed with a responsive layout. Recently, Google has also introduced an update to penalize non-responsive website designs in mobile searches.
2. Failing to Consider Basic Design Elements
Some website designs are guilty of either going flat-out or completely overboard failing to consider the basic design elements. Including numerous customization can result in big flaws and distract the audience from the actual content. Websites with minimalist design elements can also be a big turn-off to the visitors. Hence, it is vital to create a design with proper balance.
From photos, banners, videos, to other sorts of graphics, make sure you pay attention to each and every element to encourage customers to make a favorable action.
3. Poor Contrast
This is the worst thing you can do to your site’s design. The trend is evolving, but it is essential to keep the basic design philosophy intact. As per design experts, the more important the information is, the darker it must appear on the page. You can always reduce the color tone as you move down from most important to least important information.
4. Using Flash
Flash was a hit, but its days are over. Still, numerous successful and big sites use flash, but in a different way. Flash is a huge resource hog, damaged with vulnerabilities. Even it has been targeted by hackers and can cause a private risk to your site. Additionally, there are Flash cookies that can bypass the security settings of the browser. Worse than this, it can lead to sharing information among different browsers, making it difficult to maintain privacy.
Things that can be done in Flash can now be easily practiced in HTML5. Hence, to be honest, Flash is not worth the time.
5. Improper Use of Sidebars, Footers, and Headers
Most of the designers consider heading areas, sidebars, and footers an exclusive platform for advertisements. But, it is a huge red flag when there are numerous banners and ads displayed, particularly when there is very less content to showcase. A design is better when it is able to better utilize such areas for navigation. Hence, it is vital to maintain proper balance and design throughout the site.
6. Confused Navigation
A confused navigation system can result be a hard experience for your visitors, thereby affecting your online business. It is of utmost importance to design a smooth and error-free navigation system for website design.
With a flawless and simple navigation system, you are offering your customers a convenient way to navigate through your site. Use short descriptive labels across the top of the page with single drop-down options. Also, always include a search box at the top to help your customers search content as per their relevance.
7. Making Important Information Difficult to Find
Another common design mistake is making important information difficult to locate. The homepage must include links to core information, like return policies, FAQs, shipping details, and more. There must also be appropriate sub-menus for product descriptions and articles to help visitors reach that specific section with ease.
When creating a website design it is essential to focus on the needs and queries of the customers and make that content easiest to find.
8. Not Updating the Site’s Design
While the digital world has brought numerous amazing technological advancements, it has also opened doorways to cyber security thefts and risks. For such reasons, it is essential to keep the design theme and plugins updated. An updated site design ensures that every unauthorized entry is protected to enter your domain.
An easy way is to install a real-time protection as well a CAPTCHA to identify automated attacks.
9. Ignoring the Analytics
This is again a common and critical mistake in the website design process. It is ignoring the importance to use analytics properly. You can accurately measure the success of your website by digging down data deeply and analyzing how visitors respond to the site and content on your website.
As a result you would be able to use tools that can help to detect poorly performing webpages, identify vital conversion flows, and test promotions and banners in order to revamp the weaker facets and find the best available option.
10. Dealing with Broken Pages
Finally, dealing with poorly optimized web pages can be the worst thing for a visitor. Seeing a ‘page not found,’ especially when it is related to a product or landing page is unprofessional for the visitors. The page might still exist but is not displayed due to a broken plugin or site conflict. Large numbers of websites also lose genuine conversions by ignoring their product descriptions and failing to offer enough information.
The bottom line is any such flaw can create a huge impact on the business. The best way to avoid such issues is to actively keep eyes on the website design. In addition to this, it would be viable to take feedback from customers. There are different tools that can help locating and resolving some of such issues. In addition to this, it is essential to have a hands-on approach to a design system that can help eliminating such problems and keep a strict check on every major and minor detail.