As a web design agency we’ve seen a lot of websites. There are great sites and sites that need work. These errors can range from the visual and aesthetics of a website to errors that affect the user experience, loading speed and even SEO.
While it’s easy for us to spot problems on a given website, we recognize that for individuals who don’t spend their days immersed in this world it’s not such an easy task. That’s why we’re highlighting some of the top web design errors we see and how to address them.
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Make Text Easy to Read
Making a website easy to read is an important factor to consider when designing your pages. This mistake is easy to make since many people think about text as they are used to seeing it in a print publication. However, reading from a screen on both desktop and mobile is a much different experience for users. You want to be sure that the font is large enough it can be easily seen on a small mobile screen, make sure to break up your text into easy to digest paragraphs (3-5 lines is best), and differentiate headers and paragraph text with different sizing and font choices.
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Don’t Abuse Capital Letters
Capitalized text can definitely attract more attention, but overusing it on a website can actually hinder the user experience. Overuse can result in a user simply skipping the information that you’re intending to highlight. This usually happens when capitalization is used in long paragraphs that span multiple lines. If you’re going to use capital letters on your website, try to make them short headings that do not occupy more than one line.
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Make Navigation Easy
It is important that the navigation of your website is simple and intuitive so that users can easily access any part of the website within a couple of clicks. Websites with fewer pages may find it easier to avoid this particular pitfall, but no matter how big your website is we recommend that you pencil out your navigation prior to beginning the design and organize the pages in a hierarchical order. Make sure that customers can reach the most important information and that you funnel them to conversion opportunities within one or two clicks.
As you build your website page hierarchy consider these helpful tips:
- Combine information from similar products or services to reduce the overall page count
- Keep the main menu to one line (5 or 6 menu items)
- When determining submenu pages keep the list short to ensure all items can be seen on the browser when opened.
- Avoid creating menus with more than three levels
- Poor Use of White Space
We see this mistake often on websites that are trying to share an extensive amount of information with the user. Businesses try to condense information to ensure the customer sees it all, but instead this approach ends up deterring potential customers.
Giving attention to white space also provides you good opportunities to highlight your call to for your users.
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Avoid A Wall of Text
While it might work in print, your online text cannot look like a Word document or your users won’t read the information you’ve so carefully written. Make sure that users can actually read your information and avoid presenting them with a wall of text on each page.
Use white space to your advantage here by utilizing good margins, by providing line breaks, separate text-heavy pages with imagery and videos, and make good use of headings and subheadings to further break up the text.
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Too Little/Irrelevant Content
This is perhaps one of the most common pitfalls that most companies make when building out the pages of their website. It can be tempting to create a separate page for every single thing that your company does. However, this can lead to building pages without enough content to make them valuable for site users.
On the other hand, some businesses attempt to create pages of information that aren’t relevant or important for what their potential customers are looking for. Instead, of falling into these two traps instead think about how you can build robust pages with high-quality content.
If you find that your website falls into any of these traps we hope this article will help you to address and fix those issues. Good luck!