Top 7 Website Design Mistakes To Make

Ecommerce sales continue to explode, and are fast becoming a major source of income for many businesses. Your website is one of your business’s most important means of marketing and generating sales, whilst also offering many new potential customers their first impression of what you have to offer as a business.

This is why having an effective website design has never been more important, and should your website currently have any design mistakes, however small, they could be losing you new sales right now.

To have a great website, you need professional website design with effective development that will constantly support an online visit from a potential customer, no matter the device they are visiting on. Your website must always look amazing and run perfectly, as the longer someone stays on your site, the more chance you have to convert them into a customer. Can you honestly say your current website does this? Or are you already asking yourself questions like;

How Can I Stop Missing Out On New Sales?

Does My Current Website Design Have Any Mistakes?

The quickest way to get these questions answered is to run a quick website design review. Below you will find what we believe to be 7 of the most common website design mistakes that currently plague eCommerce websites. By paying close attention to each of these design areas you will already be miles ahead of many of your competitors in preparing for increased traffic and sales to your website!

Are you highlighting the right information about your business when someone first visits your site? When a visitor initially lands on your website they will expect to see key messaging of who you are and what you offer, without having to navigate around.

By ensuring that at least your name and some of your products/services are immediately visible on your home page, you can drastically cut your bounce rate overnight whilst watching some of those visitors who stay longer make a purchase!

Is your website truly responsive? If not you are in real trouble and need to change that right away. A responsive website needs to work equally well on desktop and mobile devices. This means when viewing your website on a mobile device, a visitor should get the same sort of experience as when visiting on a desktop computer.

This is called having a responsive layout, which can automatically adjust the website according to the screen size it is being viewed from - Thus eradicating the need to zoom, pinch or even ‘swipe left’ just because a potential customer is visiting on their phone and not a desktop computer. To check just how friendly your website is to mobile screens take Google’s Mobile Friendly Test .

When you visit a page on your website is it immediately obvious to a visitor what they should be doing? Are the actions available to them highlighted and easily accomplished? For example can they easily view products, learn about them and then make an instant purchase?

If your website is even slightly confusing to you, imagine how a new visitor would feel? To improve their experience (and increase the likelihood of a sale) you will need to tune up the intuitive page design and navigation of your website.

Every page should have at least one clear and powerful call-to-action, whilst the content of each page should try to list the most important information first, and run in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom formula.

No one is going to stay on a website that confuses them, or whose content is hard to read. Whilst fonts that look fancy or handwritten may look nice to you, imagine if you are a potential customer who just needs to read the facts quickly and make a purchase - Would a website difficult to read make you more or less inclined to try and buy something?

The same can be said for text and background color contrasts, keep things simple and readable. Just stick to the basics and you can’t really go wrong: Easy-to-read fonts and high contrast text-to-background color combinations!

Now that your website is easily readable, is it easy to scan through and get the information needed? Visitors don’t want to get bogged down whilst they are searching for specifics on your website. Keep your text short and sweet - Bullet pointing key information can make a page extremely scannable without losing any pertinent information.

Typing into a search bar to find what you are looking for is the norm these days. New visitors to your website could make a beeline straight for your search feature to find what they came for. This is why your search features must work well (ie give exact and accurate results), and be well positioned for ease of access.

This goes for your contact features too. Prospective and current customers must find it easy to communicate with you, or they will just go elsewhere. Your contact page should be seen as a page that can turn visitors into customers. It is that important. Provide as many contact features as possible, and make sure that you monitor them all regularly as nobody likes to wait once they have reached out to communicate!

You may have noticed by now that the key to good website design is keeping things as simple as possible, and when it comes to clean and elegant page layouts nothing could be more accurate. Your website copy has to be to the point and error free. That means no typos, missing words or bad grammar. If you are unsure about spotting all mistakes get a professional proofreader and/or a capable colleague to help.

Keeping the website looking elegant is more than just good writing - You need to be aesthetically aware too. Think about what you like to experience when shopping in a brick and mortar store - Cool, crisp and clean designs, not stores crammed full of junk you have to sift through to find what you want. Keep this same principle to the design and page layouts of your website.

Last, but by no means least, is the whole concept of a consistent branding design between your website and your business. Many people will discover your business through your website and this is the first place they will encounter your key branding elements, such as logo, products, and the overall online theme you are projecting.

A consistent branding design helps you anchor key elements of your business’s marketing platform together, such as social media outlets, packaging etc. Make sure your website always shows your logo and company color scheme throughout it’s pages, and on social media.

Is your website truly responsive? If not you are in real trouble and need to change that right away. A responsive website needs to work equally well on desktop and mobile devices. This means when viewing your website on a mobile device, a visitor should get the same sort of experience as when visiting on a desktop computer.

This is called having a responsive layout, which can automatically adjust the website according to the screen size it is being viewed from - Thus eradicating the need to zoom, pinch or even ‘swipe left’ just because a potential customer is visiting on their phone and not a desktop computer. To check just how friendly your website is to mobile screens take Google’s Mobile Friendly Test .