A business website is a very crucial component of your firm’s marketing and branding efforts. Individuals come to your site for specific reasons and you must address these reasons appropriately so that you can be in a position to sell your products and services to them.
This is what makes the difference between successful and profitable businesses online and the ones that fail. As an entrepreneur, you have to invest in a good web developer who will design your site in a professional way. A well-thought-out and designed website will increase the chances of success for your business. So, here is a list of 10 deadly mistakes a web developer can do to mess up a business website.
Lack of Clear Call to Action
A good business site should have a clear call to action. You should let the users know what is expected of them once they visit your site. For instance, book a service call, subscribe to your newsletter, schedule an in-person consultation, click to get a live chat, and much more.
You should ensure that you have a web design that lets your visitors know exactly what the next step is; this will lead to an increased conversion rate and increased business for your company. A lack of clear call to action on your site is fatal to your business.
Use of Orphan Pages
When the developer is developing your site you should ensure that he makes all the pages include a clear indication of the site they belong to. This will make it possible for users to access the pages directly without necessarily going through the home page. In addition, every page of your site should have a link to the home page and an indication of where they suit in the structure of the company’s information space.
Using Frames
When the developer splits a page into frames, it causes confusion to the users. Frames break the fundamental model of the web page of the user. When a page is split into frames, the user cannot bookmark the current page, printouts become difficult and URLs stop working. This can cost your business a lot of sales.
Long Scrolling Pages
Research has it that only 10 % of visitors in a site scroll beyond the content that is visible on the screen when a page opens. Therefore, when a developer puts long scrolling pages it means a majority of the visitors will not bother to look at that content. What this implies is that the visitors may opt to visit other sites where they can get the information they need easily and quickly. It is therefore of paramount importance to have all the crucial information as well as navigation options on the top of the page. In addition, the developer should minimize scrolling on navigation pages to enable visitors’ access critical content with ease.
Also see: Must Consider Before Writing Content For Your Business Website -What ?
Failure to include Navigation Support
You should not assume that all the users will know how to maneuver on your site to get the information they need. To boost your business through your site, you need to ensure that you provide adequate navigation support. Have a web design with a good structure and communicate the structure explicitly to the visitors. For instance, you can have a site map to show the users where they are and where they should go to get the content they want.
Focus on Blinks
It is crucial that your website looks good but the developer should not focus on adding to much ‘blinks’ to your site. When your site has so many ‘blinks’ it is deadly because this distracts the users from the key messages and crucial content on the site and as such they will rarely take the action you intended them to. When a site does not have a lot of quality content but instead has many distractions and flash content, it will be hard to convert the visitors to customers.
Use of Non-Standard Link to Pages Colors
It is well known that blue represents links that have not been seen by the user and red or purple represents links that have been seen previously by the user. These are standard link to pages colors and when you use non-standard link pages then it is going to affect your business negatively. This is so because understanding link colors is one of the navigation aides and when you mess the users by using non-standard link page colors then they might opt to make their purchases from competitors’ sites. This will definitely lead to lose of business.
Lack of Integration
If your company is serious about generating more business on the online platform then it should have a Twitter account, Facebook page, LinkedIn account and an email newsletter provider and the list goes on integrated with the website. When you link all these together, you will generate more business for your company because this encourage visitors from one network to link up with you on the other networks.
Use of Edge Technology
Use of latest web technology can be disadvantageous to your business especially if the technology has not been tested and authenticated. Most of the visitors in your site will be concerned more about the content and the customer service and little about technology. Some of the latest technology can make users systems to crash and if this ever happens you can bet that those users will never visit your site again.
Constantly Running Animations
Constantly running animations on your site will have an overpowering effect and you should work to give your visitors peace to read the content on your site.
great work thanks for sharing this info about web development
The whole content is loaded with useful information and i am impressed with Orphan Pages and each page should have a link to home page. It bounds your user to stay with ease.
I agree with your 1st point, because call to action of a website decides how well your audience will convert to your payee customer. Well written article, keep it up!
Hello Obasi Miracle, what an awesome blog is it. The most common mistake to be avoided is “Cluttering Up The Web Design With Too Much Content” yes, too much content will always create confusion to the users and difficult to understand and access for them. So, if we can avoid this we can have good traffic to the site.
This is a timely and highly informative post. Yes if your web page does not have a visible call to action, no worthy user will waste time on your website.
Great content to read. People out there needs to read more content like this to have a great website. keep up the great work and share more content like this with us.
have a nice day!
Hi Obasi,
Its really an awsome and helpful post. In order to design a high quality business website to promote sales and to attract audiences, the above mistakes need to be neglected in your site. Thanks for sharing such a nice article.
Thanks and regards,
http://www.quality-web-solutions.com/
Hi Obasim villa it’s nice article and keep sharing with your friends it’ll take a great look
Nice article obasi, this is the first time am reading your blog and i must tell you that i found the blog and the articles inside very useful. Thanks for sharing
Thanks for that compliment Prince, we are trying our very best to come up with tips that will end up helping many tech minded peeps out there, this is something we must learn to do with absolute dedication and hard work too
Although am not a wed-designer but I make use of website often, you have it all and you have written everything about what can bring about buyer-seller grudges when it comes online business. Entrepreneur should atleast put these point into consideration if s/he really want to stand firm in the industry
Thanks for dropping by Adesanmi, the tips in this article will definitely be very useful to everyone that does any kind of design on the web including bloggers and forum owners.
You ‘ve got to agree with the part where you have animation,flash,blinks and the likes disturbing your overall user’s experience on the website.
Font and color choice is another thing you need consider as a website designer. knowing that bad font usage can actually increase the bounce rate of your site as many of your readers aren’t having all day or time to struggle with your bad choice of font’s.
Hope this turns out to help even newbies that want to venture into website development