Running a successful website is a mammoth task that requires considerable planning and effort. Do you think you know all there is to designing and running a successful website? Stop and take a look at the following ten mistakes that you should never commit when designing, launching and maintaining your website.
1. Adding too much personalization on your homepage
The focus of your website should be on your customers, not yourself. Excessive personalization on the homepage, such as including your photo is unprofessional. The ‘About Us’ page is more appropriate for personalization and can help you to create effective connection with visitors.
2. Make the site flashy and slow
The golden rule of website design is ‘keep it simple’. Don’t add animations, audio and video features to your website because they please you. Make sure they are relevant and use bandwidth judiciously. Excessive use of such features can considerably increase the time web pages take to load, irritating customers and discouraging website use.
3. Give them too many options on a page
Don’t confuse customers by overloading them with a plethora of choices and navigation links. If your customers cannot decide which link they should click on and cannot easily find what they are looking for, they will get bored and leave your site. Structure your website such that customers will not have to choose from more than five navigation links on a page.
4. Ignoring to address security issues
Ensuring the security and privacy of your website is an essential goal and lapses in this regard can permanently damage your business reputation. Hire an experienced and reputed web hosting service after double-checking their security features, including physical security of servers, back-up data, power back up and access to data. Additionally, if you require customers to enter sensitive data such as health information or financial data, then hire an expert to check the security of your website. Keep a watch on unusual activity on your site.
5. Including obtrusive and excessive advertising
A clutter of advertisements and pop-ups on every page of your website is a turn off. Choose a compact area on every page for ads and include only those advertisements that are relevant to the page content and your business. Including inappropriate advertisements can erode your credibility.
6. Excessive use of Jargon
Customers don’t want to do business with a website if they can’t understand what has been written. Use minimum technical terms unless you are creating a website for a specific industry or small target audience. The goal is to make customers clearly understand all you have to offer and convince them to work with you. Excessive use of jargon can interfere with this goal.
7. Bragging but not informing
If you want customers to do business with you, don’t cross the line between bragging and informing. Customers are not interested in tall claims about your achievements but in concrete evidence. Provide them with testimonials and press coverage about your website to allow them to evaluate your effectiveness, credibility and value. 8. Allowing unmoderated chatting
Unchecked online chats can be counterproductive and wasteful. To develop interactive relationships with customers start a company blog instead of online chatting. To allow your customers to instantly get in touch with your company, share your IM screen name. Webinars are another option for cultivating healthy relationships with customers and building credibility.
9. Broken links
Broken links on a site is one of the greatest sins of all in web designing. It conveys lack of quality and disregard for customers. Regularly check your site for any bad links and take corrective action.
10. Posting outdated or conflicting material
Outdated, invalid, irrelevant or conflicting content on different pages is confusing. Make different parts of your web site coherent.
Though these rules are not universal and there might be some exceptions to them, they are applicable to most businesses and websites. After all the hard work on web design, you don’t want such trivial issues or a little complacency to interfere with the success of your website. Avoid these mistakes and remove all roadblocks between you and successful web entrepreneurship.
Before you hire a vendor, compare multiple custom website design quotes at a Business Network. For further information, read our web development services advice.
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