Your website is critical to the success of your business. It not only sparks a first impression among consumers but also facilitates the generating of leads, driving of conversions, and building of strong brand loyalty. Unfortunately, many businesses across the world—and indeed, even here in the Caribbean—view their corporate website simply as a necessary evil in an increasingly internet-driven world. These attitudes have resulted in the development of online presences that are unintuitive, unengaging, and ultimately, ineffective. Today’s article is going to explore the most common pitfalls of modern web design and expand on how to address them so that you can better treat your website like the long-term investment that it is.
#1: Inconsistent Design
Some of the biggest red flags of an inexperienced web designer are inconsistencies across your site that severely detract from the user experience. Differences in navigation bar layouts between different pages, the presence—or lack thereof—of breadcrumbs, or links to certain key pages that only appear on a few of the pages can all cause frustrations in the everyday browsing experience.
Thankfully, addressing this is an easy fix. Simply basing your website around a number of readily available templates solves many of these issues, as they’re expressly designed with positive browsing experiences in mind. Alternatively, you can turn your existing design over to a neutral third party. By observing their browsing habits and taking their advice into consideration, you can identify the aspects that are at the root of an unpleasant user experience and take the necessary steps to address them.
#2: Low-Quality Content
As the old adage goes, content is king. Your business can develop the most beautifully designed website around, but, if there’s no reason for consumers to actually visit it, it will simply be a wasted effort. Due to the difficulties in acquiring experienced, highly capable content creators, however, many companies brush text aside and emphasise other aspects of their website, often with disastrous results.
The unfortunate truth for most businesses that struggle with this is that rectifying it requires partnering up with an external content creation company, or more simply, hiring individual writers as permanent members of your staff. Thankfully, your SEO strategy should involve consistent updates to your content in the form of new, up-to-date blog posts anyway, so an experienced content creator will prove to be a wise long-term investment going forward.
#3: Unresponsive Layouts
As wireless connectivity rates and data transfer speeds continue to improve, consumers across the Caribbean are increasingly turning to mobile devices as their primary internet browsing devices of choice—consider the additional convenience of features like digital assistants, and it’s easy to see why. Despite this, there are still a fair share of businesses that haven’t accounted for this shift in browsing habits, and still haven’t updated their website to create a new, mobile-friendly version. Some studies have gone as far as to suggest that more than 50% of consumers are pushed away from a company if their website doesn’t display correctly on mobile devices, so ensuring that you get it right the first time around is of the utmost importance.
When looking to address this problem, it’s important to keep in mind that responsive design is difficult to implement retroactively. If you already have an existing website that is causing you some difficulties, scraping your entire design and starting from scratch could potentially be an effective time-saving measure. Creating a responsive website will not only modernise the look of your entire website but also facilitate the process of maintaining it, as it will more easily scale to modern screen resolutions of all sizes, improving forward compatibility.
#4: Too Minimalist/Too Excessive
Minimalism is all the rage in web design these days, and with good reason! The web is still littered with the outdated, graphics-heavy pages of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the shift to minimalism has given corporate websites a more professional allure while simultaneously appealing to the scrupulous eyes of modern, savvy consumers. However, true minimalism is incredibly difficult to get right. If your approach is a sparse, empty web page with a few lines of text and some graphics, it’s likely to appear unfinished. In contrast, put too much emphasis on making it look complete, and you’re likely to overload your audiences with too many images, paragraphs, headers, and links. It will be confusing to look at, impossible to navigate, and unlikely to encourage anyone to spend more than a few seconds trying to decipher where they should be looking.
Walking the fine line between these two extremes is difficult, and is why so many businesses turn to professional designers and developers. If you insist on going it alone, however, here are a few tried and true tips to make the most of the tools at your disposal. First, choose clear, legible fonts that will clean up the look of your content. Next, only implement pictures or graphics that are applicable to the subject matter at hand—cluttering up the design of your pages with irrelevant images, or worse, ads, is a sure-fire way to put your audiences off. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, break larger sections into smaller, easily digestible segments. This will maximise your use of whitespace without your pages appearing barren.
Web design is a tricky endeavour, with many pitfalls that are commonly experienced by large and small businesses alike—thankfully, this article can act as the resource necessary to guide you through the most prominent of them. With some luck and a lot of patience, you can craft a highly appealing online presence that bolsters your business with enhanced engagement, lead generating capabilities, and profit.