Top 5 Website Design Mistakes and How to Easily Fix Them:
After working with countless clients in the website design space, we’ve seen the same repeated mistakes made over and over again. Simple mistakes that might seem harmless enough, but are actually losing your business potential clients and qualified leads.
Here’s a list of the top 5 mistakes that we’ve seen with our clients and how we would recommend that you could easily solve the issues:
The List:
1. Not Having a Clear Call-To-Action (CTA)
What’s the purpose of your website? If your ideal client happens to land on your page, what do you want them to do? Believe it or not, it’s not that difficult to have your visitors go throughout a path that you intentionally and strategically craft.
There are two main ways that business owners mess up this part of their site. On one hand, you have businesses that put up a nice picture and the company logo and assume that it “looks nice” and that’s good enough. Wrong.
On the other hand, you have those who believe in the “more is better” approach and completely overwhelm the visitor to their website. Both of these extremes are not doing your business any favors.
Instead, why not create 1, maybe 2 simple CTA buttons such as “Learn More” or “Get Your Free Estimate Now”.
Simple and effective design means you can strategically have your visitors go through the following path:
Homepage > Learn More About Company > See Your Business as an Expert Figure > Reach Out
2. Making Your Contact Info Difficult to Find
To keep this one simple – take a look at your website now and ask yourself, “how difficult is it to find my email or phone number?”
If the answer isn’t, “it’s clearly located on the top of my website and as clear as possible… you’re doing this incorrectly.
In the digital age that we live in, the average attention span isn’t going to leave room for your visitors (especially those that are older) to search endlessly to finally find your phone number hidden on the bottom of some obscure page on your website.
Don’t make it harder for your potential clients to reach out to your business – keep it simple.
3. Not Using Trust Elements
Too many businesses focus on the wrong aspects of their website design. The visitor on your website doesn’t care about your company logo, they don’t care about the nice picture that you put up of your office… they care about “why should I reach out to this business and why should I trust them?”
Use any of the following, if not all to show the potential customers why you are an expert in the field and why they should reach out and trust your business:
- Featured In Section (NYTimes, NBC, Local News Channel, etc.)
- Testimonials
- Industry Affiliations
- Non-Profit Organizations
- Real Statistics to Show Your Expertise (# of clients served, # of 5-star reviews on Yelp, revenue created for clients, etc.)
4. Using an Outdated Website Design Template
Whether you like it or not, your website is the first impression that most customers have of your business (even for referrals).
With how fast technology changes in this space, it’s not surprising that you see a lot of professional service businesses that have a website with broken and missing components. What type of first impression do you want to leave with leads that you receive online?
An easy metric to test if you have this issue is to look at stats of how many online leads your business has received the past few years. If you are seeing a steady decline, it’s time to update your online presence in order to capture more business online.
This is difficult for most business owners to conceptualize because there are no stats or tracking that they would have in place to see how many individuals are landing on their page and then leaving to go to a competitor, but if you are using an outdated website design template, it’s probably much more than you’d think.
We know this as we’ve had previous clients with this exact same issue and when they upgraded their online presence, they saw online leads and sales jump up as much as 30-40% from the previous year.
5. Not Using Your Website as a Sales System
Too many business owners and website designers out there focus on the wrong things – colors, pictures, font types… it all is pointless unless you build a website that actually gets you results. If you aren’t getting an excellent return on your investment, what’s the point of updating your website?
Clean and professional-appearing design is important, but building a customized online solution that gets real results is what matters at the end of the day.
At my firm, Norba Design, we focus on building a website as a sales system that sells and explains your business to potential customers 24/7. No nonsense, just consistent results for our clients.
What does this mean for you and your business? Templates and one-size-fits-all approaches don’t work and won’t work for your online solution. If you’d like to learn more about customized online solutions and receive a free website audit, reach out to me at [email protected] or visit us at http://norbadesign.com/ and we’d love to learn more about we can help your business.
