Your website may look great but many people make simple mistakes when designing their websites. Is your website attracting viewers and converting them into customers? Or are they clicking away within seconds of arriving on your home page? It can be bewildering when you have an attractive site that isn’t working in the way you expected. Some simple but common design mistakes could be causing the problem. If you’re unhappy with your bounce rate, check the list below to see if you’re making any of these design errors with your website.
Too many colours
If your website is a riot of colour, it’s likely to visually overwhelm your visitors. They won’t know where to focus. It’s best to stick to a limited palette, with one hero colour and a small range of complementary shades used consistently for different elements such as break-out boxes and subheadings. If you don’t already have a brand colour palette, you can create one using online tools like Adobe Color or Coolors.
Hard-to-read fonts
You want your content to be easy to read, so while decorative fonts might look cool, it’s best to save them for accents. Ideally, you want to choose no more than three fonts and assign them to elements such as headings and body copy. Pay attention to the font size – it needs to be big enough to read – and also things like leading and kerning, which deal with the space around the letters. Your text should not be too spread out nor too squashed together.
Huge walls of text
This is one of those common mistakes in website design, as you no doubt have so much to say. Most internet users like their content in small, digestible chunks. A giant wall of text is likely to scare them away. Be concise with your content, and if you do have a lot of information to share, try to break up the body text with plenty of subheadings, paragraphs, and interspersed graphics.
Distracting elements
Another one of the most common mistakes in website design is filling every pixel of the screen, leading to clutter and confusion. When your customer arrives at your website, there should be no doubt about where you want them to look first. White space is your friend. Keep the number of elements to a minimum, and disable annoyances like auto-playing video, which many people find irritating.
Poorly-written content
Even if your site looks sleek and modern, mistakes in your written copy will put your customers off. A study performed by UK company Global Lingo found that 59% of respondents would not use a business with spelling and grammatical errors on its website. For a start, it does not come across as professional, and also poor spelling is often found in spam and scams, so it can make a customer doubt your authenticity. At the very minimum, run your content through a free tool like Grammarly before you publish it.
Unclear navigation
If your site’s navigation is disorganised and your customers can’t work out how to get from A to B, they won’t stick around. Pages missing from your menu, no easy path back to the home page, and lack of searchability are all frustrations that negatively affect a user’s experience. Make sure that your menus are clean, organised and complete, and apply the “three-click rule” that states a customer should be able to access almost any page on your site in three clicks or fewer.
If you’d like help with your website design, have a chat with the specialists at Moreweb about creating a clean, modern, well-laid-out site that your customers will enjoy using.
