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3 Website Design Disasters to Avoid

We often get asked to take a look at someone’s website to offer feedback and sometimes we even offer because it’s nice to help where we can. Sometimes we are pleasantly surprised, there tends to be something we can feedback on and help with but we see some really well considered websites. At other times the experience isn’t quite as good. The pages are filled with website design disasters and we wonder whether we can leave the website without anyone noticing and back away slowly so we don’t have to let them know what we think.

To help you avoid making the same website design disasters we wanted to let you know about three that we have seen in the last couple of weeks.

Website Design Disasters 1: Poor Background Choice

It’s great to have some colour on a website and having a background colour is one way of achieving that but it has to work. When you are choosing a background colour, make sure your text colour is contrasting so that text can easily be read. You may think that it’s ok, you can see it well enough but it should be really easy to read. Your website visitor hasn’t come to your website for a challenge, they want to get information quickly and easily. Also consider whether someone who is colour blind or dyslexic would be able to read it easily. The more accessible your website is, the more people you will attract to your business.

Website Design Disasters 2: Menus on Mobile All Over the Place

So, someone has come to your website, they like the look of it, they are interested in finding out more, which means you’ve done a solid job of the home page, well done! Then they click on the mobile icon and it all goes wrong. One of the following things has happened:

The menu background is transparent and they can’t read the menu items because of everything on the page behind it.

Or

Every time they click on a menu item the menu disappears and they are stuck on the homepage.

This is really bad. We understand that not everyone is a designer and they might make some bad choices on background colour but this website design disaster is down to not taking care of a key part of your business. This should have been tested before you put your website out to the world. It really doesn’t give a good impression.

Website Design Disasters 3: Terrible Stock Photos

Now, we bang on about this a lot on our challenges, “Images can make or break a website” we say. We say it because it’s true. If you come to a website full of stock photos that look cheap or worse, remind you of something you would have used in a school project, then that doesn’t say professional, successful business.

There will be people who are so put off by the images they don’t bother to read anything. There will be others who are kinder, which is where we fall into, who give the business owner the benefit of the doubt and remind themselves that the business has nothing to do with web design. But then when we do our research into other businesses who have invested time, effort or money on their online presence and also seem to know their stuff in their area of expertise, then we are likely to go for one of those businesses.

The Good News

The good news is that most of these website design disasters are easily solved. If you know you are making some of these errors, we recommend you go and resolve them straight away. If you are unsure go and review your website and check that everything looks good and works well on every page.

If you are putting off sorting out this kind of thing on your website because you know you need a new website and you think you’ll just sort it all then, don’t leave it. We had clients who left a really bad website up for a while and it was probably hurting their business because they saw a change in leads when they took it down. You can read more about that in this previous blog post.

For more hints and tips on improving your website check out our Five Things to Improve Your Website Conversions free download. If you are planning on starting a new website from scratch then our Website Blueprint free download will guide you through the whole process to creating a successful website.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

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