Don’t Make These 5 Simple Website Mistakes - LaunchUX

Captain's Blog

Don’t Make These 5 Simple Website Mistakes

infographic for 5 common website mistakes

How effective is your website? Ideally, your website should be laid out simply, contain lots of valuable information, and entice customers to fill out your ‘contact us’ form or call you, but many websites fall short by making one of these five simple website mistakes. Let’s take a look at these web design fails so that you can avoid them.

Complicated Forms

Keep all the forms on your website extremely simple by only asking for the information you have to have. For most websites, this means you’ll have one form on your ‘contact us’ page so that customers can ask a question about a service or start the process of scheduling an appointment. This form should give a single text box for the customer’s full name, a text box for their email address, and a larger text box for their questions. You can also put an optional box for a phone number, but in today’s modern society, most customers prefer to be initially contacted by email and may not answer their phones for a phone number they do not recognize. In your initial email, you can answer their question, tell them about the service and request a phone number and the best time to call them to speak further.

Not Mobile Friendly

According to Statista, 33 percent of people who use the Internet do so on their cell phones, and mobile e-commerce is a 430+ billion dollar a year business. This means that if your site is not mobile-friendly, you’re doing your business a huge disservice and missing out on potential sales.

Too Simple

Because most website administrators and developers know that the majority of online searches and sales start from a cell phone, they go to great lengths to keep the website simple. In some cases, this means that there are more pictures and graphics than information, especially on the home page or splash page. The truth is that you still need a menu, and you still need to describe your business, its services, and how you help the customer. Not to mention, if you don’t have text on your website, you won’t rank high in the search engine results because you have too few SEO keywords and a poor human readability scores.

Too Confusing

A website needs a home page, one to three service pages, an ‘about us’ page, and a ‘contact us’ page. The menu links to those pages are typically either found across the top of the page or down the left side. Most websites also include a blog or article page so that they can keep their information fresh, advertise articles and services on social media and show off their expertise. Items like the in-depth cookie policy, sitemap, privacy policies, terms of use, ad policies, career information, and other misc information pages about the company should be put in a footer menu. This helps ensure that your current and potential customers can find relevant information quickly. If you need examples of websites and pages, you can look at your competition. Are their sites easy to read? Can you navigate quickly through the pages? Would you change anything about these websites?

Too Many Popups

The ideal number of popups on a website is zero. This is because you do not want to discourage people from using your website by blocking the information your potential customers want to find behind a big popup that grays out the information, blocks the use of the site, and forces them to either click the ‘ok’ button or close your site.

Of course, there are exceptions. You do have to show your cookie policy, and many sites put that policy and the agreement in a big square box in the middle of the page. You do not have to have it in the middle of the page, you can put it as a header or footer that’s always visible until the user clicks the ‘ok’ button.

The second popup you’d need is if the information on your site is expressly for people over a certain age, usually 18 or 21. This applies to websites that sell alcohol and tobacco or provide mature content and is required by law.

Other than those two notifications, you should not have anything else on your website that obscures the view. This includes automatically opening message windows, email sign-up forms, ‘no, don’t go’ boxes when someone moves their mouse toward the top of the page, and ‘get notifications’ for this website boxes. Just remember, the more difficult you make it to read the information on your website, the more likely the individual is to close your website and find someone else.

Effective Website Design with LaunchUX

If you need a simple, yet effective website that entices new customers to order your products or services, Launchux can help you. We will research your business and the industry, design your website and ensure it has high-quality content that attracts and retains customers. To learn more, contact us today.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *