Don’t Make These Five Web Design Mistakes

The top mistake that people make with web design is to use Flash on their site. Your visitors will not be that impressed with your beautiful Flash site so don’t waste your time and money with this. They want information about your products and services and most couldn’t care less that you have a Flash site – many will leave without even seeing what you have to offer.


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.


Making your website look like a catalog with links everywhere to everything that you offer is the second mistake to avoid. This is normally done due to the fear of missing out on a sale or offer and people believe that they have to display everything. There is no evidence to support that this works.


Many Internet marketing studies have revealed that where the visitor is presented with too many choices they end up making none. 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.


You want people searching on Bing, Google and Yahoo to be able to find your web site so not optimizing your site for this is mistake number three. Writing for visitors and not for search engines is a view held by many web design experts. While there is truth in this, it is quite easy to write for your visitors and optimize for the search engines at the same time.


The smart thing to do is to see what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for plumbers in London. As an example we will choose the term “Plumber in London" as the keywords most will be using. So it makes sense t o optimize your site for these keywords. 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.


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. You could end up getting your site penalized in the top search engines if you have too many images. Online research companies have found that a web site has around seven seconds to satisfy its readers. 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. There is no point in producing a fancy looking web site that has a poor message and does not encourage your visitors to contact you, join your email marketing list or buy your products or services. A better solution is to hire a professional copywriter for your sales message or write it yourself while letting your web designer create a nice looking design for you.