Imagine this: You’re an hour away from your website launch. Everything is planned out great—except when the site launches, it loads too slowly or doesn’t load at all. When you have it checked, it turns out it’s due to a mistake you could have caught by double-checking prior to launch.
Web design professionals in Kansas or Idaho will tell you the same thing as web designers in Mumbai and London would do: You need to be thorough in every aspect of your website before you launch it. Watch out for and avoid common web design mistakes, so you can attract more eyes to your site.
Tell Them Straight
When a customer lands on your website, it has approximately 10 seconds to catch their attention. One way to do that is to keep the layout simple. Don’t crowd your landing page with unnecessary distractions, such as too many unorganized links, pictures, and videos, or a chunk of text that will disorient your customer.
Of course, you don’t need to sacrifice style for function. You just need to lay down what your company offers on the front page in a way that tells your customer “hey, this is what you came for; come check out; we can deliver it for you.”
Slow Starters Get Left in the Dust
Bad navigation and a non-responsive website will get 61.5 percent or 73.1 percent of customers to leave a page, but a whopping 88.5 percent will click back almost immediately if your page doesn’t load immediately.
Cutting load times involves a lot of optimization. On the front end, that means minimizing your file sizes, optimizing load times for scripts, and deferring loading for larger files until everything else has loaded. Back end optimization involves the reduction of server response times, finding a better host server, and running a compression audit.
Responsiveness is Great
In 2016, mobile and tablet usage surpassed laptop and desktop usage for the first time. Websites that are not responsive or mobile friendly miss that huge market. Designing your website to fit all screen sizes and resolutions should be a priority if you want to have a huge cut of the online market.
Optimizing your website for use across all devices can start by dropping flash from your site. Flash is not only bad for SEO, but it also makes your page load slower. Adjust the user interface for your site according to the platform your customers are accessing it from; it’s harder for customers to tap on tiny links on a desktop site from their phones.
Compression of images, videos, and scripts also helps with load times. Of course, you should offer non-desktop users a way to access the desktop version of your site because they might prefer its functionality.
When it comes to designing and maintaining a website, you could do it yourself or you can find a web design company that can ensure that your website does great while you focus on your core competencies. If either method brings you more customers or creates loyalty within your existing base, then it’s a big win for you.
