Your website is your online presence and so it should be as creative, beautiful and trustworthy as you and your business. Good design isn’t cheap, but it’s worth the investment as amateurs tend to make the same, potentially deadly mistakes in their DIY websites. If you’re contemplating using a template, or you just have done and you’re wondering why you’re languishing on the third page, read on…
Your content is illegible
You’ve spent a lot of time and money writing the content only to fall at the final hurdle when it gets dropped into the page and effectively disappears. If there’s no contrast between the background and the words, or there’s loads of fonts and sizes (including sub-microscopic), your visitors will have a headache and you’ll have a problem.
Too many styles
Letting DIY-ers loose with a template often leads to design disaster – it’s tempting to try out as many colours and styles as possible because it’s fun and new. That’s great until you go live and then it’s like releasing all the animals from the zoo at once.
You need to think about what your business is – do you sell up-cycled furniture? Gardening services? Different businesses have different online interactions with their markets and their websites need to do different things. Realistically, unless you have up-to-date web design training as well as green fingers, you need to engage an agency like Marketing Signals to work this all out for you.
Your site is hard to navigate
Once upon a time (1997, maybe), it was alright for visitors to struggle through your site. Now, however, an esoteric-looking landing page and fiddly navigation buttons will earn you serious bounces and not much else. Again, leave your site planning to those who know what they’re doing; it’ll be worth it in the long run.
Poor images
Thumbnail images that are so pixelated they look like the first glimpses of Pluto, or photos that have no real relevance or connection to you or your business… They just won’t cut it anymore and you need to get professional attention.
Your images should work for you – they’re not wallpaper, they define you and your brand and if they don’t say something they shouldn’t be there. As well as being relevant, your photos and images should be of the best quality, as well as the right size and proportion.
Too busy
You know that feeling when you walk into a crowded or chaotic junk shop or a jumble sale? There’s an online equivalent and it’s a messy, disorganised and overly busy website. Buttons everywhere, stacks of images, endless dropdowns and apps crowded together…
All this “noise” frustrates and distracts visitors so you need a bit of breathing space. You might worry that it’s empty or dead space, but any decent designer will be able to get the balance and flow just right.
You’re not mobile-optimised
This can render you dead in the water within weeks. Mobile browsing has overtaken desktop browsing and so if you’re stuck in desktop mode and your website doesn’t fit or work well on smaller screens, you’ll lose traffic in droves. Get mobilised!