7 Easy Mistakes to Make When Building a Website

Featured article by Jennifer Livingston, Independent Technology Author

A newly launched website can have a lot of potential. Successful websites can make you a lot of money from ad revenue and allow you to sell your products to a worldwide audience. However, sometimes websites fail. Sadly, often the failure of such websites can be traced back to simple design flaws that should have been avoided. With that in mind, below are seven common web design mistakes you should try to avoid at all costs.

1. Poor Color Scheme

Sometimes poor web design can be as simple as combining the wrong colors together. If you’ve been to design school, you learned something known as color theory. This can certainly be applied directly to web design. The wrong color choices can be distracting to the eye or even off-putting. Choosing the right colors, however, can allow you to highlight your content and make your site enjoyable for visitors

2. Confusing Navigation

Navigation, how users move from page to page, is also extremely important to the success of web design. Website navigation must be intuitive. Visitors to a webpage should be able to instantly figure out what to click to move from page to page. If you make it confusing with a lot of animations and links that aren’t clearly marked, many people may end up leaving your site in frustration.

3. Using Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash may have been impressive over a decade ago, but today it’s archaic. The reason it was abandoned was because most internet users hate it. It’s resource intensive and can slow down machines with even a lot of RAM. Animated web pages that use Flash also tend to be hard to navigate. Flash as a video format is also becoming obsolete as well. YouTube and many other sites have abandoned it for other video formats.

4. Limiting Your Website to English

It is true that the largest amount of internet users speaks and reads English. However, other languages are not far behind. 751.9 million internet users speak Chinese and 277.1 speak Spanish. If you want to reach a worldwide audience, you need to expand your reach beyond just English. Website translation softwares can help make this possible.

5. Not Including Search or Tag Functions

If your website contains a lot of content, you need to provide users with a search function, tag function or both. While websites like blogs can produce a steady stream of content that keeps an audience glued to your site for the newest update, other users may be looking for older content or specific things that aren’t on the front page. Tagging content and providing a search box can make sifting through a lot of content far easier.

6. Not Optimizing Your Website for Mobile

31 million people will only access the internet via a smartphone in 2016. This is a staggeringly large chunk of the market. You need to make sure your website is mobile optimized or mobile users won’t use your website. Google is also now penalizing the search rankings for websites that aren’t mobile optimized in mobile search results.

7. Being Too Obvious with Your SEO Attempts

Google and Bing are becoming increasingly complex with their search engine algorithms. Part of the change has been an effort to penalize websites that try to game the algorithms to gain a good ranking. These days, it’s best to not to be too overt with your SEO tactics or you will probably end up penalized. Spamming search terms on web pages will no longer result with a favorable ranking. Instead, focus on relevant content.

This list, however, should only be a starting point for good web design. Overall, it’s best to keep a website simple, intuitive and useful. Don’t get carried away with things that could end up hurting the average user’s experience with your website.

Jennifer Livingston is a business consultant and writer who specializes in business technology, customer relationship management, and lead management.