10 Point Web Design Checklist for Launching Perfect Websites
Websites play a crucial role in branding your business and attracting quality customers towards your products or services. Thus, even a small mistake could prove costly to your business, which makes it essential to have a well-organized and functional website. Most of the sites lack quality content and the ability to draw the attention of their customers owing to their poor design and lack of other features.
Here we’ve highlighted some of the common website design mistakes and how to avoid them by sharing a few useful tips.
Top 10 common pitfalls that can affect your website’s success
The website represents your business and acts as a connecting bridge between you and your customers. It is the place where they can find relevant information about your company and its products. Hence, its essential to invest time and efforts in designing a proper website to get the best results. Many businesses fail to realize the importance of having a professionally designed website and tend to lose their business.
1. Lack of quality content
The content of your website is one of the critical factors for engaging your target audience, but most sites have boring and monotonous content. They are poorly organized with no heading, bullet points, or subheadings, which makes it difficult for the readers to skim through the content.
Ideally, the content must reflect and focus on the points of interest of your readers and provide them with valuable information based on accurate facts and figures. The use of paragraphs, keywords with catchy titles, and use of conversational tone with interesting topics can attract more readers to your website.
2. Poor navigation
The website needs to be smooth and effortless to enable users to find out their way easily around your site. There should be no dead links in the web pages, and hyperlinks must stand out among other text. One of the most common mistakes made by designers is to place the link on the homepage, which directs the users to the homepage.
3. Lack of SSL Certificate:
Once you completed design portion of your website, you should think about SSL certificate as it secures tunnel in which information is passed from both ends. Growing crime has raised concern over data that users pass to website and believe that it will not be exposed and remain safe. For highest authentication, website admin can go for EV SSL certificate that not only secures the website but also establish the identity of business over the web. When you think of going with EV SSL then SSL2BUY should be in your list as it offers same EV SSL but at lowest price compare to market price. EV SSL from SSL2BUY instils confidence in your customers and assures that they are dealing with the right website.
4. Lack of readability
Most websites have content with bizarre font styles and sizes, which makes it difficult to read the content. It’s essential to have attractive and eye-catching content to catch the attention of your readers. At the same time, the text size, colour scheme must be chosen carefully to make the content more readable and digestible to the readers.
5. Slow loading websites
Websites that take time to load are likely to be abandoned by the visitors as they are likely to lose their patience. Research studies too have indicated that on an average online shopper wait for about 4 seconds for the websites to load before leaving the site. The use of heavy images, animations, and graphics-based website can reduce the speed and performance of your website.
6. Lack of SEO
Even the most beautiful and well-designed website will not yield any results if you are unable to provide them the information that they require on your website. Use targeted keywords, links, product descriptions, and product titles with text links to increase the flow of traffic to your website. Besides, using SEO can help readers find your website in the search results to attract more customers.
7. Not including a sitemap
A sitemap is a key tool that contains the list of pages that make up your website and helps search engine bots to crawl and index your site. Pages that are indexed can be easily found across the search engines and help in boosting their visibility. On the other hand, websites that lack this feature may find it challenging to attract targeted visitors and lose their business.
8. Ignoring website analytics
Analytics provide valuable insights to your business about your target audience, age, location, and preferences. It can also help in tracking your visitor, including session duration on the website, finding out the most popular pages and how they found out about your site. This can be a valuable tool in building your target customer profile and cater to their needs and preferences.
9. Lack of social proof
Most websites lack credibility as they do not have customer testimonials or reviews to showcase to their customers. Hence, it’s a good practice to include details such as client reviews, physical address, contact number, email ids to help customers build trust in your business. It’s also important to be actively involved in creating social communities through social profiles such as Facebook etc. to remain engaged with them and communicate regularly.
10. No Call to Action
Without a compelling CTA, your target users will be confused and unable to understand what they need to do on your website. A Call to Action enables visitors to focus on their next step-what, where and how? Keep your CTA simple and use clear and succinct language as far as possible. Tell your users exactly what to do.
11. Lack of responsive websites
Responsive websites are in higher demand today as people use multiple devices to access data and expect the same user experience through them. Web designers must be able to test the devices on different devices to enhance their performance. The key to successful web design is to check the performance across different devices to ensure it provides quick, fast, and smooth navigation to its users.
Conclusion
Launching a website is not as easy as it looks with careful planning required at every stage of website design. By paying some extra attention, it’s possible to avoid some of these common blunders so that you can put your efforts towards creating a flawless website.
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