Top 5 Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make

General

This post orig­i­nally appeared on the Amer­i­can Express OPEN Forum.

If you’re a small busi­ness owner, your web­site is the cen­tral hub of your com­pany, and it’s a piv­otal part of your mar­ket­ing and branding.

Poten­tial cus­tomers visit your site specif­i­cally for its con­tent, mean­ing its appear­ance and usabil­ity are crit­i­cal to its suc­cess and how those users view your com­pany. How­ever, get­ting your web design wrong can have a neg­a­tive impact on your business.

Here are 5 com­mon web design mis­takes you must avoid to cre­ate a great user expe­ri­ence and grow your bot­tom line.

1. Poor Navigation

 

Many small busi­nesses fail to make nav­i­ga­tion a pri­or­ity, but with­out care­ful atten­tion to how peo­ple nav­i­gate your site, you could unin­ten­tion­ally be cre­at­ing a frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence for any poten­tial vis­i­tor. Peo­ple visit your site for spe­cific infor­ma­tion, and if they can­not find it they will quickly go else­where, leav­ing with the impres­sion that your busi­ness is dis­or­ga­nized in more than just its website.

A good nav­i­ga­tion struc­ture should be seam­less and will keep vis­i­tors on your site longer, which means poten­tially more read­ers, sub­scribers, sales or leads — whichever is your pri­mary objective.

Web­site nav­i­ga­tion affects both usabil­ity and acces­si­bil­ity, so it’s impor­tant to make it a pri­mary con­cern. Most web­sites and blogs use com­mon nav­i­ga­tional tech­niques that are expected by the aver­age vis­i­tor. The pages and sec­tions of the site should be easy and log­i­cal for vis­i­tors to maneu­ver. Don’t make your vis­i­tors think about how to nav­i­gate your site; it should be effort­less and natural.

There are sev­eral prin­ci­ples you can fol­low to cre­ate an effec­tive nav­i­ga­tion structure:

  • Use icons to aid nav­i­ga­tion. They’re both visu­ally appeal­ing and easy to use and understand.
  • Cre­ate log­i­cal groups of related links, with the most impor­tant links on the top-level nav­i­ga­tion bar and func­tional (dash­board, account, set­tings, etc.) and legal (copy­right, pri­vacy, terms) located elsewhere.
  • Pro­vide loca­tion infor­ma­tion so users know where they are on any given page and how to pro­ceed to another area of the website.

2. No Clear Calls To Action

 

The fun­da­men­tal error of many small busi­ness web­sites is the lack of a clear call to action. We’ve all seen bland small-business brochure web­sites with noth­ing but end­less descrip­tive para­graphs. If you aren’t lead­ing users to com­mit to an action (buy a prod­uct, con­tact you or sub­scribe, for exam­ple), then you are los­ing them.

Dri­ving traf­fic to your web­site is impor­tant, but that traf­fic is use­less if your pri­mary call to action is a plain “click here” link buried in a sea of text. Call-to-action but­tons are a great way to grab the user’s atten­tion, and these but­tons can be the key to higher con­ver­sions. Invest­ing time and con­sid­er­a­tion into cre­at­ing suc­cess­ful calls to action can help guide users and address their needs while achiev­ing your own busi­ness goals.

It’s impor­tant to keep the fol­low­ing best prac­tices in mind when cre­at­ing an opti­mal call to action:

  • The design of a call to action can be bro­ken down into 4 sim­ple ele­ments — size, shape, color, and posi­tion. Each plays a vital part in deter­min­ing how effec­tive the call to action is in direct­ing the user.
  • Don’t make your users work or think, or they’ll leave. It’s not that they aren’t smart, it’s that they want access to infor­ma­tion quickly with­out spend­ing unnec­es­sary time search­ing for it.
  • Don’t overdo it with mul­ti­ple, com­pet­ing calls to action on every page. Decide what your pri­mary tar­get is and then define a clear objec­tive per page. Your con­tent should have answered, “What’s in it for me?” and your call to action should now answer, “What do I do now?”

3. Color & Contrast

 

Color and con­trast aren’t usu­ally high up on the list of pri­or­i­ties for a small busi­ness owner when it comes to cre­at­ing a web­site. But it should be, because if your web­site text does not have suf­fi­cient con­trast com­pared to its back­ground, peo­ple will have dif­fi­culty read­ing your con­tent, espe­cially peo­ple with poor vision or color-blindness.

Aside from plain read­abil­ity, color and con­trast are impor­tant because they can be used to cre­ate visual inter­est and direct the atten­tion of the user. It can equally be effec­tive in orga­niz­ing and defin­ing the flow and hier­ar­chy of a page, and it’s there­fore an essen­tial prin­ci­ple to pay atten­tion to dur­ing the design process. Here are some tips:

  • Using a free a Color Con­trast tool (which con­forms to accepted stan­dards) you can eas­ily check to see how the con­trast on your web­site mea­sures up.
  • Research how major sites use color and con­trast to improve read­abil­ity and high­light spe­cific sec­tions, and use this knowl­edge to exper­i­ment with color schemes.
  • One of best ways to enhance con­trast is by cre­at­ing size dif­fer­ences between ele­ments, mak­ing some things appear larger than oth­ers. This works espe­cially well within a min­i­mal color scheme, and it means you don’t have to nec­es­sar­ily rely on color.

4. Con­tent, Con­tent, Content

 

Peo­ple visit your web­site for its con­tent, and how that is struc­tured is a huge fac­tor in its suc­cess or fail­ure. Unfor­tu­nately, an over­whelm­ing num­ber of small busi­nesses get so caught up in over­load­ing the user with infor­ma­tion that they over­look how that infor­ma­tion is pre­sented.

Most peo­ple do not read unless it’s absolutely nec­es­sary, and they pre­fer to scan through infor­ma­tion quickly to get to the points of inter­est. This is why it’s so impor­tant to estab­lish a strong visual con­tent hier­ar­chy so users can quickly scan your site and sift­ing through rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. A log­i­cal con­tent hier­ar­chy also acts as a guide through each page and cre­ates a more enjoy­able user experience.

So when focus­ing on your con­tent, it’s best to keep in mind these three tips:

  • White space is pos­si­bly the most impor­tant fac­tor to con­sider. It will allow the user to focus on the mean­ing­ful con­tent within each section.
  • Break up lengthy pieces of infor­ma­tion into digestible blocks of text, uti­liz­ing head­ings, sub-headings, bul­lets, block­quotes and paragraphs.
  • Read­able con­tent is impor­tant, so use a good line height that is large enough to make con­tent scannable. Mar­gins and let­ter spac­ing also need to be taken into consideration.

When talk­ing about con­tent, spelling and gram­mar can­not be underestimated.

5. Clut­ter

 

We all know at least one small busi­ness web­site that seems to include every­thing but the prover­bial kitchen sink. Many small busi­ness own­ers tend to cram as much as they can onto a sin­gle page — the end result is a busy, clut­tered and unread­able page.

The more extra­ne­ous items there are on a web page, the more unpro­fes­sional it looks, and it becomes over­whelm­ing, con­fus­ing and dis­tract­ing for the user. A clut­tered web­site will also affect traf­fic because vis­i­tors won’t return if they can’t under­stand or fol­low the con­tent, which leads to low traf­fic, a high bounce rate and pos­si­bly a poor Page Rank.

Clut­ter also applies to images. Too many can be a huge dis­trac­tion and just plain annoy­ing. Images should be used to illus­trate, cap­ture atten­tion and guide the user where required.

Fol­low these guide­lines for a more stream­lined vis­i­tor experience:

  • Chal­lenge every item on each page and ask, “Does it really need to be there? Does it serve a spe­cific pur­pose? Can I live with­out it?”
  • The key is to aid the vis­i­tor in find­ing the infor­ma­tion they’re look­ing for, so make sure to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between areas of con­tent, adver­tise­ments and promotions.
  • Pri­or­i­tize your con­tent and decide what is the most impor­tant to your vis­i­tor and poten­tial cus­tomer — and sell it well.

Even the great­est con­tent can become lost in a mess of words and graph­ics, so de-cluttering is essential.

These are just five web design mis­takes that many small busi­nesses make. What other mis­takes have you noticed on small busi­ness websites?