Planning a new website for your business in 2023? A whole new year and a whole new set of goals await you, but before you go ahead, take notice of everything web designers have learnt up to now and avoid the common web design mistakes that could doom your new sit before you even launch.
Web design mistakes to help you stay off the naughty list
There are a million ways to help your website stand out from crowd. You’ll need eye-catching, original and intuitive design; built with the user in mind and populated with well-written, targeted content and professional images.
Web design is a whole discipline in itself and you’ll need to avoid generic content and cliched words too to ensure you don’t bore visitors and compel them to jump right off. Good web design is not just a case of avoiding the mistakes we’re going to tell you about here – but it’s a start!
Don’t use full text justification
Full text justification is when the left and right alignments are parallel so that the text appears in a block. Just as it would in a newspaper. Except – a website isn’t a newspaper. And full text justification is not great from an accessibility point of view.
See what we did there? With full text justification you create gaps of varying sizes between words to fill the lines, which is messy. These gaps confuse the eye and make the text very uncomfortable to read and understand on screen.
Under no circumstances use full text justification on your website.
Just to be clear – Flash is dead
We may be stating the obvious, but some web builders still use Flash. So, beware and don’t go there. Google Chrome doesn’t support it by default and neither does Apple. And Adobe announced the end of life of Flash Player in 2020. And, if you needed another reason, search engines are unlikely to pick up text featuring in Flash.
Content creators are encouraged to use one of the many other open formats instead.
Don’t use a splash or intro page
Splash or intro pages are considered outdated, but we still see plenty of them around. They are a pre-entry page to your website and often used to promote an offer or issue a notice. A browser must click an exit button to be able to get to the website, but our guess is they’ll simply leave and not bother.
Remember the three-click rule when it comes to a browser obtaining the information they want. Make sure your homepage is the one-stop hub to everything they are looking for with minimal clicks required, by not making them go through an unnecessary barrier.
No scrolling marquees, content sliders or carousels
Again, these are all design elements used in times gone by and now considered yesterday’s outdated website design trends. Don’t be tempted to use these eye-boggling ways to showcase content – there are simple, better ways.
Plus, it’s been official for some time that in a recent Google Core Web Vitals update that content sliders will result in a low score due to LCP (Large Contentful Paint). This is to do with the time taken to load these images – and particularly without the browser having any choice in the matter of downloading each one.
Content sliders are, as a result, harmful to your SEO. There are better ways to showcase images – think gallery options instead.
No one wants to ‘click here’
You know those brightly coloured buttons that say, ‘click here’? They look spammy and dangerous and no one wants to click them, no matter how you feel you can persuade them with your other design elements. Say what the click is to, for example, ‘view our latest offers’, or ‘read more about his product’.
‘Click here’ lacks imagination and clarity. Be specific about what you want users to click to and you’ll provide a much better experience.
Need help with web design? Get in touch with our web team for an initial, no-obligation chat.
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