As a small business, your website is an important piece of your branding and marketing efforts. Visitors are coming to your site for a certain reason, and you want to make sure that you answer their questions and use your site to sell your product or service. If you get your website designed wrong, you can easily lose dollars initially, and ultimately lose even more money in potential revenue that you could be making from a well-designed, properly functioning website. Grow your bottom line by avoiding many of these common mistakes among business owners.
Web Design Mistake #1: Failing to understand target market
Rather than focus on getting your site done as soon as possible, you must first research your target audience in your specific market. Then, design your website around your research. For example, if you have an older target market, maybe the font size should be larger. Or if you are geared towards a younger demographic, you need to think about catering your site to be smartphone compatible. To know where your users should go when they get to your site, know your market.
Web Design Mistake #2: Web design is too flashy or busy
In order to be successful on the internet, you need to focus on marketing your website, and not with a flashy design. Your design should not just be focused on bringing users there, but also get them to the right place once they reach your homepage. Also, flashy websites do not look good on tablets and mobile phones, and a large majority of internet users now visit sites from these wireless devices. Keep in mind that when a visitor comes to your website, they probably already know what they want out of it. If in 3 seconds they cannot figure out what to do next, you might have to go back to the drawing board.
Web Design Mistake #3: No clear call to action
What do you want your users to do once they have found you site? Do you want them to contact you, subscribe to your business e-newsletter, or buy your product? You need to tell your visitors what the next step is and when, which should ideally be right at that very moment. Your content should answer the question “What’s in it for me?” and then the call to action tells them what to do next.