19 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid

Web design is an ideal combination of technology and creativity. While you need tech understanding to use the right tools and create the designs you are looking for, you can never ignore creativity when standing out from the clutter. In the age of digitization, almost every business operating in every industry has its official website. This makes it important for you to bring you’re a-game forward and design your website in a way that gives you an edge over your competitors.
Using the right techniques and skills, it is equally important to avoid web design mistakes to build a robust and responsive website.
Here are some of the most important web design mistakes to avoid while building your coveted website:

1.Lack Of A Clear Call-to-action:

One of the biggest purposes of building a website is to convert more prospects into customers. Whether you want the visitors to take the first step towards engaging with your business or directly make a purchase from your website, it is important to have a clear call to action for them to follow. If your website does not have a call-to-action, it may prevent your prospects from engaging with you even if they are willing to do so.
Depending on the action and response you are willing to generate from the visitors, never forget to put a call-to-action on your website. Moreover, ensure that the call-to-action added is prominent, clearly visible, and easy for the visitors to locate.

2.Lack Of Sufficient Whitespace:

No one likes reading content that is crammed together without any space. Make sure you design your website so that there is enough whitespace around the text to make it legible and highlight specific content areas. Always remember that there is no need to use every corner of the page and fill it with words. Design the site and its pages, so its content has enough breathing space, making it easier for the visitors to read.

3.Keeping Your Navigation Hidden:

Never make the mistake of hiding or avoiding a menu that allows visitors to navigate your website. Along with the visitors, it makes it easy for search engines to crawl all the pages of your website while indexing it on the search engine results pages (SERPs). The website’s menu is often the first section crawled by search engines, and keeping it hidden may result in your website not being ranked suitably on the SERPs.

4.Missing Out On the Favicon:

One of the most common web design mistakes is missing out on adding a favicon for the website. A favicon is nothing but a small icon that represents your website or your brand. It is often similar to your brand’s logo and can be seen in the address bar of your browsers on the left as you open a site. A favicon acts as a reminder for a website being open in a browser and helps users identify a specific website that is being visited. It is a small 16×16 PNG file that should preferably be in good contrast with the background to make it visible.

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5.Using A Bland 404 Page:

You must be familiar with “Error: 404” messages that appear when a website or a webpage fails to load. This design is created to let the visitors know that the concerned page is unavailable now. While having a generic 404 page is not wrong, it is advisable to spend some time and effort designing it.
When you ask your web development company pune to design a 404 page for your website, make sure you add a few lines on behalf of the company/brand directly addressing the visitors. Moreover, additional information related to the alternative sites that can be visited or the period for which the concerned page would be down.

6.Lack Of Contrast In Text And Background:

Despite being one of the most trivial mistakes to avoid, many web designers make this mistake while building websites. It is never advisable to use similar colours for a website’s text and background. This interferes with the smooth reading of the content and hampers your audience’s user experience.
No matter how good the content of your website is, the lack of good contrast between the text and the background will likely make the visitors leave your website early, thereby increasing its bounce rate.

7.Using Smaller Font Size:

No matter how beautiful your website looks, using smaller fonts would negatively affect your audience’s user experience. Make sure you use fonts that are big enough for the content to be legible. In most cases, the minimum font size to be maintained is 16px. If you are building a copy-heavy website, you can use bigger fonts to make your content more readable.
Web designers often recommend keeping the font size of blogs more than that of the content posted on other pages. If you are posting written content that is long and may take quite a bit of the visitors’ time, using larger fonts and spacing the content well will improve the visitors’ overall user experience.Font size has a major impact on web accessibility. You can use an accessibility checker to see if your site is readable and whether your fonts are too small.

8.Using Only Caps Throughout The Content:

This is another trivial web design mistake that can be easily avoided. Some web designers tend to use only caps throughout the content of their websites to emphasize the message being conveyed. While using caps may help you highlight specific elements of your website, extending it throughout the content of the site would certainly backfire.

9.Using A Lot Of Different Fonts:

Web designers often use different text fonts to differentiate between different sections of the content posted. While this may work in highlighting headers and emphasizing specific areas of the website, using too many fonts would only distract the visitors.
It is advisable to stick to not more than 2-3 fonts throughout your website. Make the most of these fonts chosen by you and use the right combinations to drive the intended message home in the best way possible.

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10.Adding Generic Images:

As a web designer, it is important to know that many different websites provide similar products/services to the one you intend to build. This makes it important to be original in your approach to stand out from the clutter. As you design a website, try adding original images instead of copying the ones that already exist elsewhere.
Creating original images will help your website get ranked better on the SERPs as search engines would easily identify the images that exist elsewhere on the internet. Moreover, using pre-existing images from other sites may lead to copyright infringement, resulting in your website being taken down.

11.Adding Blurry Images:

If you go ahead with creating original images for your website, ensure they do not get blurry if enlarged. Go for extensive image SEO and choose the image size that best suits your website. Before an image is added to the site, test it on the biggest screen possible to ensure it doesn’t get pixelated or blurry if enlarged. Especially if you are building an image-heavy size for a business that belongs to sectors like fashion and interior design, collaborating with an SEO company in India could offer valuable insights into optimizing image quality and enhancing your website's visibility.

12.Missing Out On Image Metadata:

Image metadata is the brief information about an image posted to a website. This information may be embedded into the image file or added to a separate file associated with the image. Always ensure that every image you add to your website contains relevant metadata. This allows search engine crawlers to scan the images and assess their relevance to the content posted on your website. Moreover, if you are building an image-heavy site, it is advisable to include targeted keywords within the image metadata. This allows your website to rank high on the SERPs.

13.Ignoring The Target Audience:

One of the biggest web design mistakes you can commit is taking your target audience for granted. The theme of your website, the tone of content to be posted, the colours to be used, and a range of other factors must be focused on according to the customers you cater to. Never go ahead with building your website without understanding your customers completely.
The design of the website of an IT solution provider should never be similar to that of an online kids’ store. The overall look, feel, and mood of your website should depend on the customers you cater to.

14.Adding Too Many Or Very Few Pages:

An ideal web design should include just the right number of pages to drive the intended message home. Having multiple pages allows you to link them internally, leading to getting indexed better on the SERPs. However, it is never advisable to have a lot of web pages on your site as it would only confuse your audience. If you feel there is a need for too many web pages, you can stick to the most important ones and do away with the rest.
Typically, the most important pages to be added to your website include the home page, the “About Us” page, services pages, blogs, policies, and a “Career” section if you are actively hiring.
On the other hand, falling short of enough web pages is also not advisable while designing a website. Make sure you spread your content across multiple pages instead of cramming it up into a few pages.

15.Adding Content That Is Difficult To Scan:

Every web designer should know that people don’t read a website’s content the way they read a book. While every line of text is important, visitors usually scan the content and look for relevant points and keywords. It is, therefore, important to add pointers, headings, and sub-headings to make the content easy to scan.
Moreover, search engine crawlers focus more on the headings and sub-headings while scanning your website. Adding easily scannable content would increase the chances of your website getting high on SERPs. If you need to add a lot of content to your website, you should split it into different segments by headings and sub-headings.

16.Missing Out On Keywords:

Keywords are important while building a website. Based on your keyword research, ensure you use the targeted keywords everywhere on your website, including the titles, headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, metadata, and descriptions. However, avoid cluttering your websites with keywords as it would backfire and prevent your site from getting the desired rank in search engine results.

17.Leaving The Visitors With Questions:

The last thing you’d want while building your website is to leave your audience with more questions than they came with. Make sure that your website’s overall design and content attempt to resolve all the queries visitors may have. You can also add a separate “FAQs” section that answers all the basic questions of your audience.

18.Making Registrations And Sign-ups Difficult:

If you are willing your audience to subscribe to your updates, sign up to your platform or register with your business, make sure that the option for doing so is visible and the process is simple. If it takes too long for your prospects to sign up for your services, you may lose out on many opportunities.

Building A Site That Is Slow To Load:

Finally, you would never want to design a website that is slow to load. As you build a site, make sure you use optimized images, minimum extras like JavaScript, optimized fonts, and minified CSS to load your site faster.

The Final Word

These were some of the most common web design mistakes you should avoid at all costs while building your website. While some of these basic mistakes seem trivial, ensure you leave no scope for error as you design your responsive and robust website.