Web Design – Five Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Site

The number one mistake in web design is to create your website using Flash technology. You have to put your visitors first and there is no doubts that Flash sites look good but this is unlikely to impress. All your visitors are looking for is how your products or services can benefit them and having a sexy Flash site will not sway them towards using you in fact quite the opposite.


Even though high speed connections are quite common, not everyone has them and by adding Flash you will make your site slow to load and risk a lot of visitors going elsewhere. Give people what they want straight away as that is what they are expecting and it would be stupid to disappoint them wouldn’t it? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.


The second mistake is trying to make your website look like a catalog with hundreds of links to different products on the front page and subsequent pages. This is the “show them all you’ve got scenario" where website owners believe that if they display all of their offers they will make more sales. There is no evidence to support that this works.


Many Internet marketing studies have revealed that where the visitor is presented with too many choices they end up making none. Information overload like this will overwhelm your visitors and they will look elsewhere as they don’t want to experience this. It is better to organize your site into product categories and help your visitors further by adding a search box.


You want people searching on Bing, Google and Yahoo to be able to find your web site so not optimizing your site for this is mistake number three. There are a lot of people who will tell you that you need just write for visitors and not for search engines. It is true that your visitors should be your priority, but it is also fairly easy to optimize your content for the search engines as well.


If you are offering plumbing services in London then you need to think about what people looking for your service will type into the search engines. Let’s assume that the majority of people are searching for “Plumber in London". Well the web site needs to be optimized for this term. It needs to be in the title, description and mentioned a few times in the main content. Search engines are just machines and they need all the help they can get in understanding what your web site is about.


Putting too many graphics on your site is mistake number four. Lots of pictures will slow down your site and more importantly will provide a distraction to your visitors so they may end up leaving without taking the action that you want. You could end up getting your site penalized in the top search engines if you have too many images. It is well known that you have around 7 seconds to engage your reader. Having too many images could mean that your site takes longer than seven seconds to load and your visitors will be hitting the back button in their droves.


Getting inexperienced people to create your site and its content is the fifth mistake. Your web site should be your shop window where you want people to buy what you have to offer, contact you for more information or join your email newsletter list for further communications. Just let your web designer do what they are good at which is the design work while you or a hired copywriter produce the written content.