Sometimes the easiest way to create a successful website is to acknowledge and understand what makes a bad website, thus allowing you to learn from the failure of others and hopefully avoid the same pitfalls yourself.
As website design and online marketing specialists, Jump 2 IT Media have seen our fair share of websites and our team are still truly amazed that such large companies can still fall foul of a number of very common, highly preventable mistakes when it comes to the planning and execution of their website design.
Some of the most common mistakes we see companies make in their web design include the following:
Failing to have clear name, address and contact details:
You can have the best website in the word but if your customers can’t quickly and easily find your contact details, they will very quickly go elsewhere. Make sure your contact details are highly visible on all pages to ensure that your visitors can contact you efficiently.
Having contact forms that don’t work or go to emails addresses that aren’t monitored:
Believe it or not this is a very common problem. Companies think they are not getting enquiries but, in truth, they are simply not being received due to their contact forms not working or the email address set up to receive the enquiries not being monitored. Trust us, it happens!
Not fully testing the website before it goes live:
Testing your website fully is the best way to find any potential problems and fixes that need to be conducted. Broken links, spelling mistakes, pictures not loading properly are just some of the things that should be checked before a website goes live.
Having no Google Sitemap:
If you don’t have a Google site map it will take Google longer to index your pages, any new pages you add going forward, and future on-site amends that you carry out. This will have adverse effects on your organic ranking results due to the time taken for the search engines to take notice of the improvements you have carried out.
Website isn’t mobile friendly:
According to research on average almost 43% of people conducting web searches in September 2019 did so via smart phone. If your website isn’t fully mobile friendly, in both its look and usability, you will undoubtedly lose potential customers.
Inappropriate image quality:
You need to have the appropriate image quality for the available space. Making sure that small images don’t appear grainy but also making sure that high res images don’t take too long to load is equally important, with the latter a common issue on sites that use header carousels.
