Monday, April 18, 2011

Making These Five Web Design Mistakes Will Cost You

The top mistake that people make with web design is to use Flash on their site. You have to put your visitors first and there is no doubts that Flash sites look good but this is unlikely to impress. All your visitors are looking for is how your products or services can benefit them and having a sexy Flash site will not sway them towards using you in fact quite the opposite.


Not all of your visitors will have mega broadband connections and what will appear quickly to some will take an age for others and will more than likely have them clicking the back button through frustration. 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.


The second mistake is trying to make your website look like a catalog with hundreds of links to different products on the front page and subsequent pages. People do this because they fear that they will miss out on that sale if they don’t display everything prominently. There is no evidence to support that this works.


There are several studies of online marketing which demonstrate that too much choice often ends up as no choice and this will not make you any sales. The problem here is that the visitor feels overwhelmed and looks for an escape route which normally means leaving your site. Categorizing your site so that it is easy for your visitors to find what you have to offer is a far better solution.


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. It is true that your visitors should be your priority, but it is also fairly easy to optimize your content for the search engines as well.


If you are offering plumbing services in London then you need to think about what people looking for your service will type into the search engines. Assume that most people are typing in “Plumber In London". Well the web site needs to be optimized for this term. It needs to be in the title, description and mentioned a few times in the main content. That way Google and the others will understand that your company is a plumber in London.


The fourth mistake is having too many images on your web site. Lots of pictures will slow down your site and more importantly will provide a distraction to your visitors so they may end up leaving without taking the action that you want. Top search engines like Google are now cracking down on slow loading sites. It is well known that you have around 7 seconds to engage your reader. Some web sites take longer than that to display because they are full of graphics and you will lose a lot of visitors of your site is like this.


Getting inexperienced people to create your site and its content is the fifth mistake. 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.

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