Common Mistakes People Make When Building A New Website And How To Avoid Them

Your business website performs almost like a portal to the world, allowing potential customers to see what your business or brand is all about. Nowadays there are a plethora of tools and professional web design companies in the market that facilitate businesses to roll out compelling websites that can convert visitors into paying customers. 

As important as it is to find great technical solutions when building a website, it’s also equally crucial to pay attention to design considerations to make a website as responsive as possible. Here is a round-up of some common mistakes people make when building and designing a new website, and how to avoid them. 

Bad Or No CTA

Mistake:  Your website has good content that receives a lot of traffic but you’re not gaining anything much in terms of conversations. If you’ve got at least ten thousand visitors but don’t have any orders, the mistake is likely that your website design doesn’t have a proper call to action.

How To Avoid:  A good web design should contain at least one call to action (CTA) and should be effectively placed within the website. Only strong CTAs lead to a higher conversion rate.  Place a CTA prominently at the top of the page and at the end of short paragraphs,  to encourage customers to click. You can also work with a copywriter to come up with effective CTAs content and place them on the website where most suitable. 

Difficult Navigation

Mistake: Your website may look great but users find it difficult to navigate through. 

How To Avoid: Always build a website with user experience (UX) in mind. You can consider having some feedback sessions with a test pool to identify usability issues quickly. This includes understanding any drawbacks in the web design that takes away the user’s attention. You can simply test your website usability by getting a few test users to browse the website and letting them narrate their experience into a microphone while using it. Besides this, it’s best to focus on having simple, self-explanatory navigation when building a website. 

Busy And Cluttered Pages 

Mistake: You can design and build a website packed with images, text, buttons and videos with the expectation of tempting the user, but in most cases, they overwhelm them. When users can’t see a simple answer or a logical step forward, they simply hit the back or exit button. 

How To Avoid:  To make it easy for users to move forward keep web designs simple, logical, straightforward and mobile-friendly aiming to help users to get where they want to be. These design specifications should mostly be considered for product landing pages or sign-up forms. 

Unstructured Content

Mistake: Designing and building a website is not just about having the right elements, but it’s also about having them in the right place. The last thing you want is to accidentally send the user who’s near the end of the sales cycle, right back to the beginning. 

How To Avoid: Spend some time analyzing and projecting customer journeys through the content and where they are placed on a website. Try alternatives and figure out how you can best locate the elements in the website that can easily lead to conversions and most importantly deliver a good user experience (UX). 

Too Many Ads

Mistake: Your website may look great with useful content but if it has advertisements popping from every corner, then the users will have a hard time figuring out what you’re actually trying to say. It takes away their attention and can overwhelm the user experience. 

How To Avoid: As aforementioned, build and design your website with UX in mind, and make sure that you’re placing the advertisements only where necessary. Ensure that popup and interstitial ads aren’t unwieldy and difficult to get rid of if the users aren’t uninterested in them. You can also consider placing advertisements on a sidebar that doesn’t distract users from the main content of the website. 

If you’re developing your website through a professional web design company, then these mistakes are less likely to occur. However, if you are doing it on your own, make sure to pay attention to the areas discussed above thoroughly as overlooking them can lead to a lower rate of sales turnover.