Don’t Make These Five Web Design Mistakes

Using Flash on your homepage is just about the biggest mistake you can make in web design. Although Flash sites are often very sexy and have very good graphics, you have to consider what your visitors are searching for. 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. People expect instant responses these days and most web sites provide this so why would you want to be any different? 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. This is the “show them all you’ve got scenario" where website owners believe that if they display all of their offers they will make more sales. Nothing could be further from the truth.


Many Internet marketing studies have revealed that where the visitor is presented with too many choices they end up making none. Information overload like this will overwhelm your visitors and they will look elsewhere as they don’t want to experience this. A better solution is to create categories for your products and a good search facility so that your visitors can find what they are looking for.


Creating a site that the top search engines Yahoo, Bing and Google can’t find is the third biggest mistake that you can make with web design. Many will tell you that your message to your visitors is much more important than worrying about the 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". It’s then just a simple matter of optimizing your site for this search term. It needs to be in the title, description and mentioned a few times in the main content. By doing this you will provide assistance to the search engines and they will understand that you are offering plumbing services in London.


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. Google are now penalizing web sites with slow load times. 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.


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.