When you have your own business, you are going to need a top-notch website. Unfortunately, it is not too easy of a task for those who are not serious about it. Making a website involves a lot of research and creativity. Do you have what it takes? If you are considering designing your website, here are three layout mistakes to avoid!
1. Not Taking it Seriously
A potential customer or client only needs a few moments on your website to decide if they are going to do business with you or not. Scary right? It is vital that you grab them in that short window of time, and sell your shoes off. Your first impression must be flawless and run smoothly as well because many website layout factors weigh into the client’s decision to hang out and stay awhile, and the first step to ensuring you get it right is to take the process seriously and do your homework.
2. Having an Unclear Story & Purpose
What is the purpose of your website? Are you a photographer and looking to display your portfolio of photos aesthetically to potential clients? Maybe you run a store and want to have an online store presence as well?
No matter the reason, make sure you get it down on paper and that it's an easy concept to understand with your website layout. Would you stay on someone's website if you didn't know what it was trying to portray? The design and layout must tell a story, guide your visitors around to every page efficiently, hand in hand while showing them what your brand has to offer.
3) UX... What?
Another important consideration when putting together a website for your business is ensuring that the user experience (UX) is up to standards. If a customer is trying to click something on your site and being lead to an error page or taking an hour to load, they are going to jump ship, and quick. These issues also can affect your SEO score negatively. Here are some top concerns in UX:
Website Loading Speed, How well is the website put together? How many images and videos on the site, and are they compressed? It can be tricky to know all of the impacting elements that cause your site speed to plunder. But Google PageSpeed Insights is a convenient and free tool that will diagnose the speed of your website, tell you what's slowing it down, and even gives you suggestions on how to fix it!
Clutter, Have too much copy, images, and links stacked all on one page makes it hard to see and navigate. Separate your content into sections, guided by a navigation panel that is clear. This also affects loading speed!
Error pages, 404 errors happen all too often when browsing the web. Make sure all of your links are functioning correctly and direct to the right spots.
An unclear path to pages, If you do not have a clear path to all parts of your website that you want to be indexed by Google and other search engines than this will heavily affect your SEO score for the worse. Bots cannot crawl your site correctly if they do not have navigation tabs or links to get them everywhere they need to go! Not to mention the clients that get lost while visiting your site, it costs you sales!
Mobile Friendly, Mobile is the future, and according to Statista, 51.7% of internet users are mobile! Google has also admitted that they will not consider websites that are not optimized for mobile. Make sure that everyone can access your website with whatever device they please. Google also has a free mobile-friendly test that you can throw your website URL in to check.
Get Some Help
Website layout design can be a very tricky and complicated situation, but adhering to the above tips can give you a solid foundation to start. Have you considered outsourcing it? Hype Digital Marketing has a first-rate team that can get your website layout off of the ground, and you swarming in customers. If you would like some more website layout tips, deals or information about marketing, web design, SEO and more, then join our newsletter and get the help you need.