5 Common Mistakes Made During the Traditional Website Design Process

Your website isn’t for you, the simple truth that many businesses simply won’t face. With over 1 billion websites on the internet, how many of them are actually doing their job? A well-designed and growth-focused website can be a valuable member of your team working 24/7 to build your brand and convert leads. Sadly, a majority of the sites on the web don’t serve their intended purpose and even do more harm to the brand. Your website may be broken and your brand and business are suffering because of it.

Enter growth-driven design. A new and radically different approach to the traditional website design process. What makes growth-driven design different is that it keeps the focus solely on the user and meeting their needs. Creating a site your users actually want to engage with will not only help your marketing but will also better nurture your visitors into sales-qualified leads.

#1. More is Not Always Better

This is a lesson we learned firsthand. With our previous website design, we wanted to show off all of the tricks we could pull off. We had a slider full of animations and content galore! Unfortunately, the conversion rate was nowhere near what we hoped to accomplish and we saw a number of our visitors never get past the home page. By using a great tool, Hotjar, we were able to see firsthand how our users were interacting with our website. Our new, growth-driven design site is much more focused and gives the users clear direction on the next steps they should take.

Related:  Solving our Wed Design Problem: A Growth-Driven Design Journey

#2. Content is Designed Too

The words on your page are, for obvious reasons, extremely important. Making sure you have the right keywords in the appropriate places and at the correct density play a large role in your SEO efforts. But what many companies fail to realize is that the way the content is displayed is just as important. Is your text large enough? Is there enough negative space around the content to help your users focus on the content? Remember, content is a part of the design.

#3. What’s Their Next Move?

While the website may not be for you, you do have the ability to help direct the users on where to go next. Whether it be a blog post or a page on your site, calls-to-action are a powerful tool to help your visitors make that next step. If you’re not using CTA’s, start. Another issue that can happen is too many CTAs. Remember what we discussed above? By giving your visitors too many options they may get overwhelmed and leave. Make the next steps simple.

#4. I Can’t Find What I’m Looking for

Your website’s navigation is like a roadmap for your users. Just like in CTA’s, we want to give clear direction to our users. Most of the time the viewers on your site are looking for answers to their problems and the easier they find it, the better experience you give them. Too many sites out there have complicated navigations with multiple drop-downs and more. See the pattern yet?

#5. How Do You Know It’s Working?

Tracking and analyzing your website is a must. So many website owners just hope that what they have will work and in a few years maybe they’ll get a new site designed and once again hope. But with today’s technology, we don’t have to just hope. From Google Analytics to SEMrush and Hotjar and more, we now have the ability to test and tweak all aspects of our sites. This is really where growth-driven sets itself apart. Not only do we track and analyze, but we make the necessary changes over time to improve your website’s user experience.

All of these mistakes can be overcome using a better process. By thinking differently, you can have a better-looking website that actually works for you. Image, a low-cost employee that never takes breaks and always produces! It’s never too late to start so check out the free offer below to learn more about the growth-driven design process. If you have any questions or comments, let us know by commenting below!