Pull Marketing Blog

5 Web Design Mistakes Businesses Should Avoid

  

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No one likes looking at sites that are Under Construction.
Photo: Meddy Garnet

For many businesses, launching a website designed to generate leads is an after-thought; especially for new businesses. 

Worrying about web design mistakes may hit the radar screen simply because of other concerns, e.g., funding, staffing, legal issues, etc.

Most of the time, the job falls to outside web design firms or freelancers with varying degrees of input from the business owners themselves.  Sometimes, you're totally unsure of what you actually want and you can't give much direction.  So, the next time you sit down for a talk with your web designer, here are some things you might want to tell them to avoid: 

1. All Flash Designs

Sure, those crazy animations and graphics seem impressive but if you go "all flash" with your site, your content is totally unseen by search engine spiders – even more so for navigation and content links. If they’re embedded in flash, those pages can't be picked up by search engines for indexing. Translation? If the search engine can't find it, chances are potential customers aren't going to be able to either.  

2. Background Music You Can't Escape

If you're a music nut like me, you're usually browsing sites and listening to your favorite new tunes. The most irritating thing for us is clicking on a site and getting an earful of competing noise.  There's also that situation where we forget that we had our sound turned all the way up and get blasted across the room when we load a site. I'm sure you love music as much as us audiophiles, so if you want music to be featured on your site, do us all a favor and keep it in a player that people have to click play first before they get their groove on.  

3. Coming Soon

How many times have you clicked a link on a web page only to be greeted by "Coming Soon" or even better "Under Construction"? Christine Fay PullnotPush's 'Jane of All Trades' says, "I'd rather not see it (or even think of it) in the first place than click on something and be disappointed that it's not there." So, if your site is already live and you have upcoming sections, it's probably not a good idea to link there when there's no content.  

4. Inconsistent Navigation (or a total lack of it!)

This website "don't" comes from our very own Alex "Pixel Perfect" Berry. Having clear and straightforward navigation menus on your site is crucial. These days, most large sites are in the habit of putting a "site map" at the bottom of a page in addition to a main navigation bar. On occasion, you'll find a site that changes the positioning of these navigation items which is disastrous to user flow and doesn't give your visitors a whole lot of reason to come back.    

Comic Sans, isn't it about time you retired?
Photo: Steve Keys

Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Lucida - these have been old standbys for copy text on the web. They're easy on the eyes and supported by just about everything. However, there are some fonts that have been over used and abused for years that I'd never like to see used on another commercial website as long as I live. The main culprits? Papyrus and Comic Sans. Even worse? When the font size is less than 12 points in size! If you gave money to someone to design a website for you and you see walls of teeny text in either of those two fonts, fire that designer immediately and run far, far away.  

Now we all know there's way more than five things that drive people bonkers about web designs. What things have you seen that have turned you off to a company based on their website?