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Pitfalls to Avoid While Building Your Website

These days, there are many different website builders out there that can make building a website for your business possible, even if you have little to no experience with web design. But, even if it’s easy to make a website for your business that looks great, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to build a site that sells.

At the end of the day, there’s only one thing that you want out of your website — you want it to convert. However, there are many different mistakes business owners and web designers alike commonly make while building websites, and in order to get your site right, you need to know what they are so that you can avoid them.

Today, I’m going to help you learn how to build an effective, attractive website that converts web visitors into clients or customers by helping you avoid the most common website issues.

4 common website issues and how to avoid them

#1. Unclear navigation

There are a lot of things that you can do to make your website your own, and when it comes to the design of your website, a little creativity can go a long way toward making it stand out. While there are many different aspects of your website where you can feel free to get creative, the navigation isn’t one of them.

Most of the time, when someone visits your website, it’s because they’re looking for something specific. Whether that’s a specific product or service, information about what you do or even just a phone number where they can schedule an appointment with you, it’s important that your website is easy to navigate so that visitors can find what they’re looking for.

The navigation of your website needs to be simple and clear, which means that you should refrain from trying to get too creative while designing it. There’s a reason why basic menu navigation is used by so many websites — it works.

#2. Slow load time

If there’s one thing that’s not debatable, it’s that your website needs to load quickly. It takes seconds — yes seconds — for a visitor to decide if they want to stick around when they get to your website. If those precious seconds are wasted loading your website, unfortunately, few of your visitors are going to stick around and give your business a chance.

Your website’s bounce rate — the rate at which people come to your website and click away without visiting any other page — depends on a fast loading time, but it’s also an important part of organic visibility. Google and other search engines want to provide their users with the best possible experience, which means that it wants to provide users with websites that move quickly enough to meet their expectations.

There are many things that can slow your website down, but one of the biggest offenders are large, uncompressed images. Learning how to properly optimize your images will help to keep your website lean and mean, and it can also help to improve your site’s rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

#3. Cluttered design

The message you’re trying to get across with your website should be clearly laid out. That means that the content needs to be plainly written and easy to understand, and it should include keywords that are relevant to your business; however, content is just one piece of the overall puzzle. The design of your website can also help you make the message clear, but it can’t do that if it’s cluttered.

The more cluttered the design of your website is, the less clear the message will be. This can confuse visitors and make it difficult for them to tell what their next steps should be. One of the best ways to avoid ending up with a website that looks cluttered and busy is to utilize plenty of white space around the most important elements of each page.

Another thing you can do to keep your site clean and easy to understand is to avoid trying to cram too much information onto one page, or even onto one part of a page, like above the fold. Instead, pick one main focus and stick to it.

#4. Disappointing mobile experience

Mobile-friendliness is one of the most important aspects of an effective website these days. More people have access to smartphones than desktop computers and laptops, so it no longer makes sense to design your website for computers. That’s not to say that your website shouldn’t look good and work effectively on a desktop or a laptop, but providing your users with a great mobile experience is a must.

Luckily, you can get the best of both worlds by ensuring that your website has a responsive design. With a responsive design, your website will automatically reconfigure itself depending on the device it’s being viewed on. It means that there’s no need to have a separate website for your mobile users, and it ensures that everyone gets the same experience in terms of aesthetics and functionality.

Responsive design is just one of the many things you should do to ensure a streamlined experience for your visitors. You should also ensure that your website is easy to navigate, your text is formatted in a way that’s easy to read and your website loads quickly on mobile devices.

Avoid these common pitfalls by choosing the right design template

Some of these mistakes depend on you, but some of them depend on choosing the right web design template. Any template you choose should be responsive, fast-loading and designed with search engine optimization in mind.

The website templates from Websites 360® are all of that and more. Each one is designed to be mobile-friendly, SEO-friendly and attractive. Best of all, you can make them anything you want by customizing them for your own unique needs.

Build an effective website for your business with Websites 360 today.

Originally published on 3/16/20