A sound web design lies at the heart of effective digital marketing. As a matter of fact, web design mistakes go hand-in-hand. Be it through some paid advertisement or organic search result, your website is where your prospects land. Thus, the quality of your website determines the success of your digital advertising and SEO.
Appearing in top results can’t be achieved through SEO in isolation, it needs more. As a matter of fact, SEO and web design go hand-in-hand. A great organic reach will eventually fall if it isn’t backed by a toned web design. Having an on-fleek web design can engage your visitors for longer and increase dwell time, while a poor web design can increase the bounce rate of your website. This is how your web designs impact your Google ranking.
If you’re doing everything right but still are not able to check your bounce rate or improve dwell time and Google rankings, there might be something you’re doing wrong. Below is a list of-
5 common web design mistakes to avoid
1. Excessive decoration or simplicity
Have you ever been to a website that is crowded with too many flashy images, text and other media? You must have an idea how irritating it gets. When there is too much going on a website, nothing gets attention. If visitors can’t understand what a website is about within a few seconds, they are likely to bounce back. Many plague their website with too much media and a tacky web design in pursuit of making their website more appealing— all while they end up doing the opposite. Thus, to ensure a higher dwell time for your website, it is crucial to keep your web design as simplified as possible.
Just like overtly making up your website is bad, so is leaving it too simple. Though it’s a trend now but too much minimalism can make your web design appear bland. Not only does it make your website unappealing but also ineffective. If minimalism isn’t moderated, it can make your website too cryptic. This is also not good since your visitors need certain content readily available to know who you are and what can you provide. If information is too hard to find, it’ll increase the chances of your visitors bouncing back.
2. Unresponsive web design
If you don’t employ responsive web design, i.e. if your web design isn’t flexible enough to be conveniently accessed on different screen sizes, platforms and orientations, you have an unresponsive web design. It is important to make sure that your web design is responsive on all types of devices so as to keep Google from penalizing your website.
Start with using tools like Responsinator, Screenfly, Google DevTools Device Mode, etc to assess your web design’s responsiveness. Accordingly optimize layouts, media and typography on your website and employ intelligent CSS queries to make sure that your web design is responsive.
3. Non mobile friendly web design
Most of the web browsing and internet activities are done through mobile phones. Mobile friendliness has been a Google ranking factor since 2015 and, in 2017, mobile-first indexing was introduced. It is apparent that Google is primarily invented in it’s mobile users search experience So, if your website is not mobile friendly yet, you are already years late.
Regardless, there are many websites that do not have a mobile friendly web design. To ensure that your website is not penalized by Google, optimize your website to make it mobile user friendly.
4. Difficult navigation
Paving the way for easy navigation experience on your website is one important aspect of having a sound web design. Websites with navigability issues are sure to lose their visitors. Placing the navigation menu in such a way that it is easy to spot is fundamental. Surprisingly many miss out this crucial aspect of web design.
To keep from making the same mistake, make certain easy navigation on your website. Check out your website and ask yourself- Is the search bar rightly placed? Are navigation menus clearly located? How clear and usable the menus are?
Answering these questions will help you optimize your website for a better navigation experience.
5. Annoying ads
Ads are a necessary evil. This is all the more so for bloggers who rely on ads for income. Given so, it is one of the common web design blunders. These are most common of the ads related web design mistakes that frustrate visitors-
> Too many ads
> Unrelated/irrelevant ads
> Gaudy and noisy ads
> Poor ad placing
> Too many pop ups
> Hard to close pop ups
Thus, try to minimize ads space on your website, avoid annoying ads, place your ads properly and keep down pop ups. It is also important to make sure that you place only relevant ads on your website. For example, if yours is a digital marketing agency in Chennai, a digital marketing related ad would be best suited for your website.
Conclusion
SEO in absence of a sound web design is practically useless. A poor web design leads to dissatisfied visitors which ultimately harms dwell time and shoots up bounce rate. Excessive simplicity or gaudiness, unresponsiveness, non-mobile friendliness, difficult navigation and problematic ads placement are some of the most general web design flaws. To keep your web design up to mark, make sure you’re not committing these common web design mistakes.
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