It doesn’t take much business savvy to understand the importance of having a website, but these days, having a site just isn’t enough. You need to engage your customers, draw them in and entice them to buy your product or services. Your website needs to make them feel welcome, keep their attention and direct the flow of their eyes with carefully thought-out design. On top of that, you need a way to track it all: impressions, clicks, form submissions, rate of abandonment, even where their mouse moves on the screen.
Web developer? You need a psychologist.
Website design plays a huge part in the success of your business and can make or break a customer’s experience. If you want to make sure your online presence isn’t turning away potential consumers, you need to turn a critical eye to every aspect of your site. Here are the most sinful design blunders you can make.
No Mobile Optimization
Most Internet usage comes from phones and tablets. If you’re still not using a responsive site, you probably deserve to be missing out on the roughly 60 percent of traffic you could be generating. It’s not just a matter of usability either. Google punishes non-mobile offenders by restricting them in search. Regardless of whether you believe your site needs to be mobile friendly, it probably should be. And even if your site is built with mobile users in mind, it’s always a good idea to periodically audit your site to ensure all elements are translating properly across all formats.
Too Cluttered
Talk to any professional designer, and they’ll extoll the virtues of whitespace. It keeps the viewer from getting overwhelmed. Think minimalistic. Don’t bog your website down with unnecessary features. It’s tempting to cram every inch of space with graphics, widgets and text, but it’ll confuse visitors rather than enlighten them.
Slow Loading Time
Dial-up connections are a thing of the past. Gone are the days of sites that took a minute or more to load. On average, 40 percent of visitors will leave if your site takes longer than three seconds to load. You could argue that web browsers are spoiled, and you’d probably be right, but you either adapt or lose valuable traffic.
This is an example of a pop-up subscription form.
Pop-Up Solicitations
Those pop-ups that block out your screen and solicit email subscriptions as soon as you start scrolling on a site aren’t clever—they’re annoying. For every email you manage to get, you’ve annoyed hundreds of other potential customers, many of whom leave immediately. There are better ways to grab emails, but this is not one of them. Skip this tactic. Your bounce rate will thank you.
Autoplay Media
Unless your intent is to startle your visitors and send them on a frantic find-the-video hunt on your site, don’t set embedded audio and video to autoplay once the page loads. Visitors who are listening to something in the background or who simply forgot their volume wasn’t muted, especially those browsing from work computers, will quickly close your website tab and move on. As an added bonus, removing autoplay will cut down on page load time too.
No Contact Info
If your customers don’t have a way of contacting you with questions or inquiries, you’d better believe you’re losing leads. The same goes for failing to link to social media accounts. Don’t expect people to hunt you down—in most cases, it’s not worth their time.
Don’t be fooled into thinking a contact form is an adequate replacement for information that will connect customers with a human being either. Contact forms are a handy way of gathering information that can be repurposed in your marketing efforts, but it doesn’t always work. In fact, a contact form with no other info is a known source of customer abandonment. Make sure your visitors have multiple ways to contact you, whether it’s through email, phone or social media.
Flawed Design? We Can Help!
At BlueArx, we know a thing or two about design. Whether you need a new site built from scratch or a revamped design, we can help.
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