Web Design Mistakes – The Top Five

Using Flash on your homepage is just about the biggest mistake you can make in web design. Your visitors will not be that impressed with your beautiful Flash site so don’t waste your time and money with this. People are looking for information not how good your web designer’s Flash skills are – give them what they are looking for.


You have to take into consideration that not all Internet users have high speed connections so if they are using a slower service they will probably go elsewhere because your page takes too long to load. Internet surfers are used to instant answers and don’t appreciate delays so why make them wait? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.


Don’t create your site with links to everything under the sun on each page like a catalog and you will avoid mistake number two. People do this because they fear that they will miss out on that sale if they don’t display everything prominently. The total opposite of this is true.


Research on Internet marketing has proven that having too many links to offers on a page will lead the visitor to purchase nothing in most cases. Information overload like this will overwhelm your visitors and they will look elsewhere as they don’t want to experience this. It is better to organize your site into product categories and help your visitors further by adding a search box.


The next big mistake is not to have your site optimized for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are a lot of people who will tell you that you need just write for visitors and not for search engines. This is true but it is still very possible to have a good sales message in your page and ensure that it is optimized too.


The smart thing to do is to see what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for plumbers in London. Assume that most people are typing in “Plumber In London". Well the web site needs to be optimized for this term. The term needs to appear in your title, in the main body of your content a number of times and in your site description. Search engines are just machines and they need all the help they can get in understanding what your web site is about.


Putting too many graphics on your site is mistake number four. The more images you have, the more likely you are to avert your visitor’s attention from your core message and your page will be slow. You could end up getting your site penalized in the top search engines if you have too many images. You have seven seconds to interest your reader according to many online surveys. If your site takes longer than that to load they will hit the back button faster than you can say “too slow".


And the final mistake in web design is to have your site design and content produced by people with no online marketing experience. The point of having a web site is to get your visitors to take action such as buying your product or service, joining your email list or picking up the phone and calling you. You can get your web designer to produce a fancy design but write the content yourself or hire a good copywriter to do this.